Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition

Zoran Kuzmanovich

Nabokov Studies, Volume 16, 2019, (Article)

Published by International Vladimir Nabokov Society and Davidson College

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nab.2019.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/747611

[ Access provided at 6 May 2020 12:41 GMT from University of Exeter ]

 Nabokov Studies 16 (2019)

ZORAN KUZMANOVICH, Davidson, North Carolina

Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition

Introduction

Children have a surprisingly high morbidity rate in Nabokov’s fiction. Most of Nabokov’s readers
are familiar with Lolita’s dead children: Annabel Lee, Charlie Holmes, Lolita’s brother Rudy,
Lolita, Lolita’s stillborn child and even the often-forgotten but very instructive son of the barber
of Kasbeam. There is of course David’s gruesome death in Bend Sinister, the deaths of children
in the short stories “Christmas” (1925) and “Perfection” (1932), of Albinus’s daughter Irma in
Laughter in the Dark, Yasha Chernyshevsky’s in The Gift, Hazel’s in Pale Fire, Lucette’s in Ada,
and possibly the “referential mania[c]” son’s in “Signs and Symbols,” the last four all by suicide.
There is one story about the death of a child that stands out by virtue of having had
Nabokov declare it one of his “bottom of the barrel” stories and by its having evaded any
significant discussion for about nine decades. In fact, even some of those who have commented
on it seem unsure about the social relations between the main characters in the story as well as
the story’s timetable and geography. That story is “Gods,” written in October of 1923 but never
published while Nabokov was alive. Because its characters, action, time and space are potentially
so confusing, it requires a leisurely summary.

Summary of “Gods”
The story begins when the narrator glimpses gloom in his wife’s eyes, gloom that brims
with images of a city being flooded by mercury and follows a just re-experienced, dreamt, or
remembered night during which “the stars shrieked with infant voices and, on the roof, someone
lacerated and caressed a violin with a sharp bow.“ They go out onto their balcony and from there
see a boy drawing, in chalk, on the street, what the narrator calls “a god.” A cigar-smoking
buttoned-up god looking up at the sky. When the drawing boy’s mother calls him home, the
narrator’s wife’s eyes go “murky” again, and we realize that the red rubber ball under the icon in
the couples’ bedroom belonged to their now dead son, that something about the just passed night
recalled the night of the son’s death, and that the bereaved couple are most likely Eastern Orthodox
faithful. To relieve the “murk,” the narrator suggests a walk.
Near the bus stop or on the bus, the narrator pretends to be unfamiliar with the paradox of
a stationary observer inside a moving object and makes up stories about the usually stationary
objects that attract his attention. For example, he sees trees as being on a pilgrimage, hurriedly
seeking their Messiah, bending toward each other to figure out how to cross the river, or
continuing a love affair that started when the trees were people. It is not clear if he is thinking or
actually talking to his wife. As the air fills with the smells of German gasoline, Russian lilies of the
valley, and the apparently non-ethnic fragrance of lindens, the narrator exclaims: “Everything in
42 Nabokov Studies

the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar. . . .
Listen . . . today, we are gods! Our blue shadows are enormous. We move in a gigantic, joyous
world.”
The narrator gets a smile from his wife for pointing out unlikely resemblances (a
newspaper’s oversized headline looks like a zebra, etc.), and she asks him to join her in visiting the
graveside of their dead child. He agrees to go, but because there is a circus in town, and the camels
are crossing the street, the narrator’s mind drifts, and he cannot help but make another
exclamation: “How can death exist when they lead camels along a springtime street?” Again, it is
not clear if he is asking himself, asking someone else, or trying to convince himself or his wife of
death’s non-existence. In any case, as they descend into the subway, the wonder of the camel-laden
Berlin street is replaced in the narrator’s mind by some combination of Dante’s Inferno and the
Roman coliseum from gladiatorial times. Leaving behind the echoing of crunched and broken
gladiator bones, conversations that seem to be taking place in terza rima, and the reek of burning
sinners, the bereaved parents exit the subway just in time to see an airplane overhead. To entertain
his wife, the narrator tells her a long story involving early efforts at flying. The story takes up the
middle 997 words out of the story’s 3100. It is a story about a white hen that was used to test hot
air balloons sent up by Jacques Alexandre César Charles, French physicist and pioneer of hydrogen
ballooning. In the story, the balloon lands on a farm outside Paris only to have the little white hen
astound the owner of the farm by laying four golden eggs. The farmer imagines that the eggs, like
the rest of the crashed balloon, somehow came as a gift from the Virgin Mary, but the narrator
assigns the task of fertilizing the eggs to the sun.
The narrator’s fable about the hen does not have the intended effect, and the gloom returns
to his wife’s eyes, leading the narrator to remember their walk and their getting lost the night after
the funeral. He also hears the child’s mother make the only statement in the story directly related
to the child himself: “He was so little and so warm.” Moved by her grief and anguish, the narrator
tries a different approach by refusing to recognize the dividing line between the living and the dead:
“You mustn't cry. He can hear my fable, there's no doubt at all he can hear it. It is to him that it's
addressed. Words have no borders. ”
When they reach the cemetery, the narrator refuses or is unable to enter as if doing so
would confirm the boy’s death or somehow invalidate the narrator’s proclamation regarding the
borderless-ness of words. The narrator remains in the vacant lot outside the cemetery and begs
forgiveness from the child’s mother: “Forgive me if I am incapable of weeping, of simple human
weeping, but instead keep singing and running somewhere, clutching at whatever wings fly
past.”
While she is at the graveside, the narrator observes “buoyant” factories floating in “azure
mist” and reports his own thoughts and feelings:

At my feet, a squashed tin glints rustily inside a funnel of sand. Around me, silence and
a kind of spring emptiness. There is no death. The wind comes tumbling upon me from
behind like a limp doll and tickles my neck with its downy paw. There can be no death.
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 43

My heart, too, has soared through the dawn. You and I shall have a new, golden son, a
creation of your tears and my fables.

It is indeed a slight and (because of the wife’s reticence and the narrator’s exuberance) an
often-confusing story, and it may have escaped critical attention for those very reasons. In fact,
three of the four people who have written on it have each devoted to it no more than a single
paragraph and in one case only two sentences.

Critical Reception
Brian Boyd, the first to write about it while it was still untranslated, dismisses it swiftly:

“Gods” seems wrong from the start. Unlike anything else Nabokov wrote, it is experimental
fiction, irksomely so: a series of descriptions and meditations the narrator feigns to find by
looking into his mistress’s eyes. The wayflight of fancy … becomes the story’s navigational
principle … the attempt to see everything originally quickly becomes banal…“Gods”
succeeds in only one respect: it catches Nabokov in the act of searching for a means to render
the extraordinary behind the ordinary, the superhuman bursting in under human.” (VN: RY
219)

Boyd’s candid assessment leaves us with a number of gaps. It is not immediately clear why
Boyd reads the female character as the narrator’s mistress rather than his wife. The story’s action
takes place after a night during which the narrator sees or thinks he sees in his wife’s eyes what he
saw during the night the boy died and the stars shrieked. Boyd makes no mention of the boy. While
the navigational principle Boyd identifies (the female character’s feelings being named and
countered by the male character’s narratives) is certainly one structuring mechanism, the
geographical navigational principle seems to be the visit to the son’s grave by foot, bus, subway,
and foot again, with each segment devoted to the husband’s more and more desperate efforts at
dissolving his partner’s gloom. Boyd does not attempt to link the “balloon” passages in the middle
to the rest of the story nor does he point out what exactly is “superhuman” in the story.
In Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice Paul Morris offers the longest published
account of the story. Morris accepts Boyd’s reading of the story as “the perception of the
extraordinary in the ordinary” but substitutes a dialogical reading for Boyd’s monological one:

“Gods” may be read more conventionally as a mental dialogue transpiring during an

actual trip across the city or, still more complexly, as an entirely mental dialogue in
which the action is read in the eyes of the narrator’s addressee, in which case the
theme of the story – the mastery of reality through imagination – is reflected in the
manner of telling.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Mhfkr3OrAKUC&q=%22Gods%22#v=snippet
&q=%22Gods%22&f=false
44 Nabokov Studies

Morris links the 1923 story to Nabokov’s 1923 poem “Гекзаметры: Памяти В. Д. Набокова”
(“Hexameters: In Memory of V.D. Nabokov”) and in turn links “Hexameters” to “An Evening on
a Vacant Lot” but does not treat the nature of the couple’s grief over the loss of their child
(referring to it only as “recent tragedy”). He also does not discuss the balloon section, the phases
of the trip to the cemetery, or the narrator’s explicit statement that the balloon story is addressed
to the dead boy. Most importantly, despite invoking “An Evening on a Vacant Lot,” Morris does
not point out the recurrence of a certain configuration of objects and feelings from “Gods” in “An
Evening on a Vacant Lot.”
Maxim Shrayer finds the story to be “[s]tructured as a confession to the narrator's beloved
and containing autobiographical references.” He also notes that "Gods” “anticipates several of
Nabokov' s addresses to an idealized otherworldly beloved in the stories of the High period or in
The Gift”(24). In light of Shrayer’s always careful attention to the details of Nabokov’s other stories,
it would have been helpful to know which story events or characters are keyed to which
autobiographical coordinates.
Finally, in her book on the unity of Nabokov’s work, Nora Scholz treats the narrator’s
perceptions as a Shklovskian de-familiarizations that (given the repeated denials of death “in light
of the deceased child”) may initially strike us as insane. Scholz sees the concluding “spring
emptiness” towards which radical defamiliarizations lead us as supplying the kind of richly
suggestive silence necessary for the narrator to recognize “the perfect web of the world,” an
experience of the sort John Shade will have in Pale Fire almost 40 years later. (68) Like the previous
three critics, Scholz does not address either the balloon section or the possible autobiographical
links.
Each of the story’s four interpreters hints at the story’s role in giving a preview of
Nabokov’s later aesthetic. Shrayer helpfully suggests that autobiographical light may also reveal
this story to have been a building block for The Gift (24), but he stops short of turning on that
light. None attempts to explain the structural or autobiographical role of story’s middle third
devoted to pioneer days of hot air ballooning in France.

Theorizing Grief
Though I am not entirely finished with my study of this story, my initial claim is that the story
“Gods” is confusing because it is only superficially about the death of the child. However, if we
ignore that death, the story is entirely plotless and the narrator’s observations almost completely
random. Therefore, we still need to examine the process of parental grieving in the story. While
the wife cries and (to the husband) looks lost in memories of the dead child, the husband basically
denies that the death has even taken place. While literature has produced refusals to mourn
children dead by fire, there aren’t many pieces of writing based on parents’ denial of grief after
the deaths of their own children. In fact, the reaction of many parents can be summed up by
Alexander Hemon’s sentence after the death of his daughter Isabel: “now [she was] an organ in
our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.”1 And if we look at the
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 45

theorists of mourning, we find that their work in many ways is irrelevant to Nabokov’s story if it
is read as a story about the effect of a child’s death on the emotional life of the parents. What is
missing in the story is a sense of parental attachment to the child, to each other, and to the world
in which the child was alive. The Kubler-Ross stages-of-grief theories are singularly unhelpful here
even if we assume that the narrator is stuck in the denial stage.2 We must go instead to Freud and
Derrida, since their theorizing proceeds from a connection between grieving and language. Freud,
dividing grief into mourning and melancholia, offers a deceptively simple and to my mind very
incautious summary: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in
melancholia it is the ego itself” (246). In Freud’s original 1917 formulation, we get over grief by
initially incorporating the lost object into our ego but eventually displacing it and consciously
redirecting our libido to another object: “when the work of mourning is completed the ego
becomes free and uninhibited again” (245). We do not get over melancholia. In melancholia our
unconscious devotion to the un-displaceable internalized lost object becomes depression-like as
excess libido is directed inwards and often results in delusional moral inferiority.3 Given the
enchantment of Nabokov’s narrator in “Gods” with everything he sees, hears, and smells, we
cannot speak of a world impoverished and emptied out by mourning for a dead child. The only
thing vaguely resembling melancholia in Nabokov’s story is the narrator’s linking of the visit to the
cemetery to an imaginary return to Russia:

Out of the dank nether world we emerge anew into the sunlight. The cemetery is on
the distant outskirts. Edifices have grown sparser. Greenish voids. I recall how this
same capital looked on an old print.

We walk against the wind along imposing fences. On the same kind of sunny,
tremulous day as this we'll head back north, to Russia. There will be very few flowers,
only the yellow stars of dandelions along the ditches. The dove-gray telegraph poles
will hum at our approach. When, beyond the curve, my heart is jabbed by the firs, the
red sand, the corner of the house, I shall totter and fall prone.

It is not clear from this passage by itself whether tottering and falling prone upon reaching
a particular place in Russia is the prevision of one’s own dying, or the act of emotionally
reconnecting with the specific lost objects of one’s home and homeland (“the firs, the red sand, the
corner of the house”), or with a specific temporal coordinate in one’s past (“I recall how this same
capital looked on old print”). To earn the diagnosis of melancholia, these passages would have to
be read as the narrator’s unconscious but depressively ongoing reminders or fears expressed only
to himself that such a return to Russia will never take place.
Unlike Freud’s, Derrida’s reflections on mourning were most often composed in the
process of writing eulogies for friends, so by mourning he seems to mean not just grief’s influence
on the bereaved psyche but also the memorialization, the linguistic public performance of grief’s
effects on one’s psyche. Derrida’s self-described differences from Freud on the subject of grief are
46 Nabokov Studies

also worth noting: “I speak of mourning as the attempt, always doomed to fail (thus a constitutive
failure, precisely), to incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize the other in me. Even before
the death of the other, the inscription in me of her or his mortality constitutes me” (Points 321).
For Derrida, we walk around full of dead others we have attempted, without success, to bury in
ourselves, so in us they are inscribed as both alive and dead like so many Schrödinger’s cats.
Nabokov’s story about the death of a child does not offer a direct way of testing Freudian
and Derridean theories of grief. There is, however, a story of a child’s death that offers a veritable
laboratory for doing so. Comparing that story with “Gods” confirms the suspicion that grief for a
child is not the real subject of Nabokov’s story. The grief in question comes from Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s and Lidian Emerson’s reaction to the death of their five-year old son Waldo. I select
the Emersons since they had exactly the kind of experience Nabokov’s bereaved character Sleptsov
has in “Christmas” after the death of his son: a seeming resurrection of an insect. Emerson records
his dismay that the “chrysalis which [Waldo] brought in with care & tenderness & gave to his
Mother to keep is still alive and he most beautiful of the children of men is not here.” (Notes to
“Threnody,” https://www.bartleby.com/370/58.html)
Emerson’s first reaction was written only two days after Waldo's death:

"30 Jan. What he looked upon is better, what he looked not upon is insignificant. The
morning of Friday I awoke at three o'clock, and every cock in every barn-yard was
shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all
his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose
remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star
and the evening cloud,—how much more all the particulars of daily economy: for he
had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact & circumstance in the household,
the hard coal & the soft coal which I put into my stove. …the microscope, the magnet,
the little globe… the nests in the henhouse… A boy of early wisdom, of a grave and
even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness. … He gave up his little innocent
breath like a bird." (Emerson in his Journals 276)

Even the quickest perusal of this journal entry reveals that Freudian theories of mourning
do seem to apply here. Waldo’s death changed the world for Emerson, a change recorded by the
“dishonored landscape.” Like the red rubber ball the bereaved parents in Nabokov’s story keep
next to the family icon, the objects Waldo had touched literally or with his “lively curiosity” had
acquired significance in Emerson’s mind, with the rest of the world receding into impoverishment,
like the landscape that is “dishonored” precisely by no longer being subject to Waldo’s curiosity.
While for Emerson Waldo’s death changes the world, for Mrs. Emerson, Waldo’s death
changed not only the world but her as well, a condition she describes in a February 4, 1982 letter
to her sister Lucy:
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 47

… grief desolating grief came over me like a flood—and I feared that the charm of earthly
life was forever destroyed. I saw not how I could ever feel happy again. I thought of the
words "Time brings such wondrous easing" and believed Time could bring no easing to us.
I lived over my life with the child and recalled all his sweet and lovely traits. His innocence,
his wisdom, his generosity, his love for his mother I wished I could forget them all. . . . I
was not worthy to be his mother—except my love for him made me worthy.”
https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/83/2/192

Lidian Emerson’s sentiment “I was not worthy be his mother” is a form of moral self-deprecation
Freud assigned to those suffering from depressive melancholy. So Lidian’s depression would have
come from her feeling that the child’s death is somehow her fault. There is no such sentiment in
Nabokov’s story. The dead boy there never serves as a locus for transvaluation of the world’s
charms or of his parents’ moral worth. While in a letter to her sister Lucy, Lidian Emerson both
opens up and closes off the possibility that the passing of time would ease her grief, her letter to
Emerson makes the passage of time irrelevant to the possible work of mourning: “"Dear husband,
I wish I had never been born. I do not see how God can compensate me for the sorrow of
existence.”(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in his Journals 274). Following Freud, we could say
that Lidian Emerson was occasionally slipping from mourning into melancholia as she converted
her powerlessness into self-criticism, put that self-criticism into words as a moral failing, and then
granted, not to Emerson or even God but to something at once inside and outside of her the power
to rescue her from such self-deprecation.

Where Mrs. Emerson proceeded by psychic incorporation of Waldo and moral revaluation
of the sort Freud had theorized, Emerson himself spoke of the way Waldo’s death had begun a
process of subtraction, a different form of devaluation. Unlike Nabokov’s Sleptsov who is saved
from a grief-driven suicide by a moth breaking out of its cocoon and demonstrating that life was
still capable of miracles, when Emerson reflected on the fact that the chrysalis Waldo collected was
alive while Waldo himself was dead, Emerson admitted that he could “comprehend nothing of
this fact but its bitterness. Explanation I have none, consolation none that rises out of the fact itself;
only diversion; only oblivion of this & pursuit of new objects” (Emerson in his Journals 280).
Just as Mrs. Emerson had wished to resolve her grief by forgetting Waldo’s innocence,
wisdom, generosity, even “his love for his mother,” Emerson sought consolation in diversion. But
where Lidian Emerson wished to forget the past, Emerson wished to forget his vision of the future
that included Waldo as an extension of himself. One month after Waldo’s death, Emerson wrote
a letter to Thomas Carlyle:

My son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, has ended his earthly life. You
can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child
can take away.4 A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest
of all. … From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child
48 Nabokov Studies

enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. We have two babes
yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that
Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you
this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare
not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet
sustain. (Volume 8: 205)

The letter to Carlyle, most likely written on March 20, 1842 and collected in the 16-volume The
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson makes it clear how much and
perhaps how unconsciously Emerson had considered Waldo a part of himself and how much of
Waldo’s future life he had imagined, projected himself into, and guided himself by (“this Morning
Star of mine”). Waldo’s dying had in fact amputated something in Emerson. Emerson’s imagining
of Waldo as his representative is the kind of projecting Nabokov assigns to childless Pnin when
Pnin contemplates Victor’s future, so we know that Nabokov was certainly capable of writing this
kind of passage. The only projected future in “Gods,” however, is one where the dead boy is
replaced almost as a reward for the couple’s overcoming of their parental grief: “You and I shall
have a new, golden son, a creation of your tears and my fables.” Emerson had theorized a similar
exchange of grief for guidance or genius in his essay “Compensation”: "But the sure years reveal
the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover,
which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius"
(Nature and Other Essays 148).
Emerson wrote this in spite of losing his father, wife, and two brothers in a fairly brief span
of time. In Nature, shortly after the death of his brother Charles, he would write: “[n]othing divine
dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not
for barren contemplation but for new creation.” The death of his child, however, turned out to be
a slow teacher and fickle muse. The transformation of “privation” into creative insight seemed to
lag behind the impoverishment of the world, a diminution in Emerson’s sense of what is possible,
and a destabilization in his sense of himself, forcing him into a recognition of his new, uncertain,
and perplexing relation to “the Invisible and Untold.”
The two years that passed between Waldo’s death and Emerson’s writing about it again in
the essay “Experience” do not seem to have been “the sure years” of resilience he spoke of in
“Compensation”:

The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest,
plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with
which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. … In the death of my
son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I
cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my
principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me,
perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 49

worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied
was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged
without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve
that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

“Experience” is one of the few essays Emerson did not “test” by first delivering versions of
it as a speech. If delivered as a speech, the essay’s tonal mixture of disconsolateness, gruffness,
denial, and self-pity would have been remembered primarily as an impotent grumble. Grief, the
essay claims, even grief occasioned by the death of one’s child, though clearly a calamity, does not
bring us any closer to the people we have lost nor to a greater understanding of the ”real nature”
by which I think Emerson means the material world as permeated by human and divine spirit.
Neither does grief change us by teaching us something we did not know before about
ourselves/world/God. The greatness of the grief Emerson felt had simply failed to produce a
compensatory commensurate insight or a creative spurt. After Waldo’s death, for Emerson the
world simply rolled on in its impoverished state. Only Emerson’s phrase “some thing which I
fancied was a part of me” suggests through the word “fancied” that some learning had taken place.
It reveals an aspect of internalization of others by grief that Freud would consider “the work of
mourning” in “Mourning and Melancholia” and Derrida would question and complicate in his
own The Work of Mourning.
In the metaphorical and emotional logic of “Experience,” Waldo is the offspring and a
possession and an heirloom (“beautiful estate”) which Emerson learned he could afford to lose,
because his habit of internalizing the lost Waldo as a valuable object leaves Emerson “neither better
nor worse,” since neither remembering nor trying to forget Waldo made any difference. In
“Threnody,” his poem on the death of Waldo, written between 1842 and 1846, Emerson catches
himself in the act of recognizing the complexity and the dangers of the emotional economics of
interiorization in which he had indulged by imagining Waldo as his property or estate or emissary
or biological extension. In the poem he seems to reverse his sentiments from his journal and
“Experience” and addresses Waldo directly: “Not mine, I never called thee mine, / But Nature's
heir, … /Not what I made, but what I loved.” The only suspicious possessive in the poem refers
to Waldo only as “my truant wise and sweet.” “Threnody” ends with the voice of a “deep Heart,”
one of the more complex versions of what Emerson elsewhere calls “the Oversoul.” “Deep Heart”
tells Emerson that his grief is “blasphemous” because he is not up to the task of realizing that
Waldo’s death is an omen of something “beyond the reach of … speech” and “incommunicable. ”
“High omens ask diviner guess[es]” than Emerson’s regarding the reasons for Waldo’s death; the
right kinds of guesses “unbind / The zone that girds the incarnate mind.” 5 In the second half of
the poem, so tonally different from the first, Waldo dies because “deep Heart’[s]” “servant Death,
with solving rite, / Pours finite into infinite.” In this reading, Waldo dies so that Emerson might
learn to cherish as his own “The riches of sweet Mary's Son, / Boy-Rabbi, Israel's paragon.” Given
the tonal shift in the second part of the poem, I simply do not understand how Emerson found
comfort in that explanation, and I suspect Nabokov after 1923 would not have either. My suspicion
50 Nabokov Studies

is based on Nabokov's 1925 poem "The Mother" in which John the Apostle hears Mary’s sobs after
Golgotha and thinks “What if those tears / cost more than our redemption?" (PP 33)

Over your grief days skim

insensibly, and neither on the third
nor hundredth, never will he heed your call
and rise, your brown firstborn who baked mud sparrows
in the hot sun, at Nazareth.

Nabokov found Emerson’s poetry “delightful” (Strong Opinions 64), but he never said
anything about “Threnody” or its suggestion that death through Jesus Christ un-girds “the
incarnate mind” and “Pours finite into infinite.” Suffice it to say that where the second half of
“Threnody” emphasizes Waldo’s death as a means of transformation from finite unknowing into
infinite knowing for which Jesus Christ’s life and death are a model, Nabokov’s poem emphasizes
not Jesus’s miracle of mud sparrows taking flight6 as bid by the Son of God but the enormity of the
loss of Mary’s human son. Another difference, perhaps the most significant one, has to do with
the power of words. For Emerson, infinity’s contiguity promises something that is beyond words;
for Nabokov’s narrator and perhaps for Nabokov of “Gods,” words are precisely the means of
overcoming all borders, including death.7
Emerson’s apparent about-face regarding the value of grief should be considered in light of
the differences among the audiences he may have imagined for the four genres in which he
addressed Waldo’s death: journal/diary, letter, essay, and poem. There is, for example, a way of
reading “Threnody” as Emerson’s public grieving over the loss of poetry’s power to change the
times in which it is written and thereby also less public grieving of the failure of his own genius:

‘Tis because a general hope

Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope
For flattering planets seemed to say,
This child should ills of ages stay,
By wondrous tongue and guided pen
Bring the flown muses back to men.
Perchance, not he, but nature ailed,
The world, and not the infant failed,
It was not ripe yet, to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain…

Since little Waldo had not attempted to bring back the muses, Emerson may have very well
continued to see himself in Waldo despite the warning he gave to himself about the language of
possessiveness. Emerson’s doing so serves in this essay as a nice bridge between a few stray
sentences Goethe devotes to grief and Derrida’s expansion of Goethe’s thought. In Elective
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 51

Affinities Goethe theorizes that “[w]e die twice: first when we die and then when those who knew
and loved us die.”8 In the Work of Mourning, Derrida’s book of eulogies for his dead friends,
Derrida clearly recognizes that both public professions of grief and psychic wounds that fuel such
confessions are living memorials, the marks lost loved ones leave on our souls or the crypts their
dying makes of those souls. The work of mourning for Derrida involves yet another death, our
own, in addition to the two Goethe had already mentioned:

“[T]he world [is] suspended by some unique tear … reflecting disappearance itself: the world,
the whole world, the world itself, for death takes from us not only some particular life within
the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through
whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up….” (The Work of
Mourning 107)
“[A] stretch of [our] living self … a world that is for us the whole world, the only world …
sinks into an abyss.” (The Work of Mourning 115)

Although treating the loss of a loved object as the loss of the “opening” to the whole world
sounds like Freud’s original definition of mourning,9 Derrida’s notion of “sink”-ing draws no
distinction between mourning and melancholia. Both states of mind require that the mourners
internalize the lost object and consider it a part of themselves, so in that sense deaths of those we
love invariably diminish us. Since the days of John Donne, such diminishment has not been treated
as news. What is new is Derrida treating such internalization as highly problematic because it is
at once an act of loyalty and disloyalty. Because the grief cannot be directed at the lost object, it
must be directed at the interiorization of the lost object that dwells within us, and thus it leads to
the realization that whatever and whoever we are, we are so in part because of who the people we
lost were. Their alterity is now our alterity, and it remains so however undesirable we may find it:
“cryptic incorporation always marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning (melancholy or
mourning)” (Derrida, “Fors…”: xxi). This invasive sense of alterity (internal exteriority) and the
question of fidelity this alterity brings along, Derrida took very seriously:

I mourn therefore I am, I am—dead with the death of the other, my relation to myself is first
of all plunged into mourning, a mourning that is moreover impossible. This is also what I
call ex-appropriation, appropriation caught in a double bind: I must and I must not take the
other into myself; mourning is an unfaithful fidelity if it succeeds in interiorizing the other
ideally in me, that is, in not respecting his or her infinite exteriority. (P: 321)

Derrida’s point is that mourning made successful or resolved through interiorization in Freud’s
sense means at one level the disavowal of the external loss if not also indifference to the otherness
of others to which we are not privy, while those parts of their lives that touch our own are buried,
sedimented, and enshrined within us as unresolved grief. Mourning is always impossible since
unresolved mourning is unresolved precisely because we are mourning for ourselves. Derrida’s
52 Nabokov Studies

insight is particularly relevant to Emerson. Having insisted that he be called Waldo and having
named his son Waldo,10 Emerson is at least at one level mourning for himself when he declares in
an apostrophe to the (in the poem) never-named Waldo that he was “Born for the future,[and] to
the future lost!” This closing off of possible future worlds makes Derrida resort to a hyperbole:
“there is no common measure adequate to persuade me that a personal mourning is less serious
than a nuclear war” (“No Apocalypse…” 28).
In his reflections on the death of Vladislav Khodasevich, Nabokov describes Khodasevich’s
death in a way that anticipates Derrida’s concerns regarding the otherness of others and the
impossibility of consolation if one dwells on the private loss:

Well, so it goes, yet another plane of life has been slightly displaced, yet another habit—the
habit (one's own) of (another person's) existence—has been broken. There is no
consolation, if one starts to encourage the sense of loss by one's private recollections of a
brief, brittle, human image that melts like a hailstone on a window sill. (SO 227)11

In the same address, while refusing to grieve publicly, Nabokov would observe that “private despair
cannot help seeking a public path for its easement” (SO 224). While Nabokov does not explain
whether despair’s “public path” actually helps the bereaved, his statement should be considered
against Nabokov’s sentiment expressed in a letter to his mother after the death of his father: “at
times it’s all so oppressive I could go out of my mind – but I have to hide. There are things and
feelings no one will ever find out” (VN: RY 194). In Lectures on Russian Literature, Nabokov would
repeat his concern with preserving the line between the public and private: "No biographer will
ever catch a glimpse of my private life." (LRL 38) 12

The Turn to (Auto)biography

If we consider “Gods” without reference to Nabokov’s private life, we are left with a very
poorly done story about the effect of their only child’s death on the emotional life of its parents.
The effect is very difficult to trace. Other than elevating a red rubber ball to the venerated status
of an icon presumably because their boy had touched the ball, the parents in the story do not seem
to undergo any of the facets of parental grief made evident by the Ralph and Lidian Emerson’s
grief over Waldo’s death and theorized albeit in different ways by Freud and Derrida: there is no
sense of a world lost, no griping/bitterness against the present, no revaluation of one’s moral
worth, no diminution of oneself in the present, no sensed depletion of the future, no dwelling on
the nature of the child’s world, no idealization of the child’s talents, no protesting the child’s
innocence or vulnerability, no suggestions of nature failing, no concerns over destabilizing of the
boundaries between self and other, and finally no turning to Christian notions of resurrection and
transformation. Although the farmer sees the golden eggs laid by the little white hen as a gift from
the Virgin Mary, the idea of a new golden son fathered by the narrator’s fables seems far more at
home in some other story than the one narrating the life of Jesus Christ. Besides, Nabokov twice
dismissed those who thought he had any real interest in religion (SO 160, PP 13-14).
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 53

If we do turn to Nabokov’s private life, and if we keep an eye on Freud’s and Derrida’s
theories of grief while remembering Nabokov’s musing that “private despair cannot help seeking
a public path for its easement” (SO 224), three of the most puzzling aspects of the story become
clearer: the middle third about ballooning, the apostrophizing final line: “O rainbow-colored
gods…, ” and the imagery of the final few paragraphs. Let’s take them in turn.

The Balloon Story

The balloon portion of the story conflates two different events from the early days of French
experiments with aviation: the September 19, 1783 second public demonstration of lighter-than-
air flying staged by the Montgolfier brothers and the August 27, 1783 flight of a hydrogen-inflated
balloon designed and launched by Jacques Alexandre César Charles, a physicist and a member of
the French Academy of Sciences whom Nabokov makes into a character in his story. But it was
the Mongolfier brothers and not Charles who first sent up living beings into the air: a sheep, a
rooster, and a duck. The eight-minute flight was witnessed by a crowd of about 130,000, with Louis
XVI, Marie Antoinette, and most of the French court among the crowd. Nabokov borrowed the
colorful images and the festive atmosphere from that event but ignored the sheep, the duck, and
the rooster, 13 substituting for all three a little white hen. In Nabokov’s story, the hen is a last-
minute purchase made by Charles’s son: “when the sphere lurched upward, the old physicist
followed it with his gaze, then broke into tears on his son's shoulder, and a hundred hands on
every side began waving handkerchiefs and ribbons.”
There is no record of Jacques Alexandre César Charles having had any children, so the
presence of the comforting son in Nabokov’s story seems motivated by something other than
fidelity to the historical record of early ballooning. Nor is the story of a dead child opened up by
virtue of the historical Charles having been given a fictional son. I suspect that Charles’s son is
there to witness and share the father’s sorrow and triumph at least in part because the story was
written less than a year after Nabokov’s father Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was shot and killed
while trying to defend his political opponent who was a target for two Russian assassins. Here I
follow Priscilla Meyer and Galya Diment in turning to biography when the fiction’s form
considered by itself fails to account for the fiction’s shape. In considering the endings of Invitation
to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, Galya Diment suggests that "Nabokov's anxiety and reluctance
to re-live the painful experience of his father's assassination appear to be the strongest factors
responsible for those 'playful' strategies in the last pages of the two novels" (276). Priscilla Meyer
points to the same event as a motivator for some of Nabokov’s aesthetic choices in Pale Fire: “The
attempt to make sense of his father's assassination is the ultimate moving force behind Nabokov's
exploration of the history, literature, natural evolution, and language of the North” (Find… 4-5).
So how does a fictional dead son turn into a dead real father? For answer to this question,
we have to turn on the light Maxim Shrayer pointed to but chose to leave off in his suggestion that
“Gods” may be a possible finger exercise for The Gift. The image of “rainbow-colored gods” in the
final sentence of “Gods” looks back to the white-chalked god drawn on the pavement by the
German boy at the beginning of the story. The narrator and his wife are looking at that god from
54 Nabokov Studies

above, from their apartment’s balcony. At the end of the story, however, the narrator feels himself
“soar” through the dawn, and he appears to be at once on the vacant lot by the cemetery and
somehow above it, addressing “invisible crowds” of “rainbow-colored gods.” Having previously
declared that he and his wife are gods, here he attempts to describe the sensation that generates
such a feeling, but his doing so also gives us a preview of Fyodor’s thoughts about his lost
adventurer father who in The Gift does the physically impossible by stepping in and out of
rainbows. Within Christianity (Genesis 9: 9-17), rainbows are traditionally read as God’s
continuing demonstration that He is upholding the everlasting covenant with men and other
animals that He would not destroy the Earth again by flood. And given that “Gods” starts with
images of flooding, the rainbow is a much needed phenomenon in the story. Nabokov, however,
does not limit the symbolic valence of rainbows to kept covenants. Rather, he seems to associate
multi-colored radiance, iridescence, and stained-glass14 with memory’s selective filing of details
that may someday receive artistic treatment. The rainbows thus seem to be connected with the
“delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing
large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic" (Speak, Memory 167). This
process which Nabokov elsewhere calls “future recollection” involves treating images and events
from real life as if they are materials for fiction: “The Past is a constant accumulation of images,
but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out
and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is
the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events” (SO 186).
For Nabokov, memory is inspiration’s servant, an artistic instrument for endowing objects, even
trifling ones, with multicolored light, not unlike the light young Waldo’s curiosity shined on the
landscape before it was “dishonored” by his death. The combining of such filed away illuminated
objects Nabokov refers to elsewhere as “cosmic synchronization” that brings back even the dead:

A passerby whistles a tune at the exact moment that you notice the reflection of a branch
in a puddle which in its turn, and simultaneously, recalls a combination of damp green
leaves and excited birds in some old garden, and the old friend, long dead, suddenly steps
out of the past, smiling and closing his dripping umbrella. The whole thing lasts one
radiant second and the motion of impressions and images is so swift that you cannot check
the exact laws which attend their recognition, formation, and fusion […] and you
experience a shuddering sensation of wild magic, of some inner resurrection, as if a dead
man were revived by a sparkling drug which has been rapidly mixed in your presence.
This feeling is at the base of what is called inspiration …
(Lectures on Literature 377-8).

In another passage of Lectures on Literature Nabokov explains to his Cornell students the
relationship between Marcel Proust and his narrator Marcel by suggesting that Marcel is an
“eavesdropper” or a special facet of Marcel Proust: “There is a focal shift here… which produces
a rainbow edge:15 this is the special Proustian crystal through which we read the book […] Proust
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 55

is a prism. His, or its, sole object is to refract, and by refracting to recreate a world in retrospect”
(LL 210, 208 ). Finally, in his essay “The Tragedy of Tragedy” Nabokov associates rainbows with
free will,16 with “that spirit of free will that snaps its rainbow fingers in the face of smug causality."
(The Man from the U.S.S.R 326)
Rainbow light. Rainbow edge. Rainbow fingers. Because rainbows are not something we
can look for, they surprise us with wonder, wonder of the sort that cannot become familiar and
thus fade. Most rainbows in Nabokov’s works seem connected with the sense of a dissolving space-
time grid in which Nabokov’s characters find themselves. Also, having remembered his first love
as resembling a “rainbow spiral in a glass marble” and “a wisp of iridescence,” (“First Love”)
Nabokov, a self-designated “brittle young fop” (S,M 117) eventually associated his own life with
another rainbow-like image: “A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own
life.” (S,M 275).
If we now treat the rainbow as the special Nabokovian crystal for recreating worlds through a
signature focal shift, we should expect the recreated world that results from inspiration (artistic
selection, blending, and re-combination of actual events) in “Gods” to have its own causality and
specific gravity. The narrator of “Gods,” acting as an eavesdropper on Nabokov the author,
refracts or cosmically synchronizes in the balloon passages of the story a combination of French
pioneer aeronauts and almost accidentally resurrects a memory that would speak volumes in
Speak, Memory, in an episode during which Nabokov’s father was “put through the national
ordeal of being rocked and tossed up and securely caught by a score or so of strong arms”:

From my place at table I would suddenly see through one of the west windows a
marvelous case of levitation. There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his
wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawling in mid-
air, his limbs in a curiously casual attitude, his handsome, imperturbable features
turned to the sky. Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would
fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and
then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining as if for good, against
the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who
comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted
ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up
to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of
eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the
swimming lights, in the open coffin.
(SM 378)17
56 Nabokov Studies

Fig. 1. VDN’s headstone. Thanks, Gene Barabtarlo.

I submit that Nabokov even in his memoir wants to leave his father eternally suspended in
mid-air in order to conceal from some part of himself that the figure in the coffin is the no-longer
levitating angelic V. D. Nabokov being cheered on by the crowd as Jacques Charles is in the balloon
portion of the story. Furthermore, the description Nabokov gives of his father’s intermittent
levitation resembles nothing so much as the “oo/ah,” “fort/da,” “gone/there” game played by
Freud’s grandson to divert himself from the emotions caused by his mother’s absence.18 Nabokov’s
words end up having no borders, but in a very different sense than the narrator gives that phrase
in “Gods.” Having completed its “last” flight, the “sprawling” body in the “open coffin” is
“imperturbable” but no longer because of V.D. Nabokov’s self-possession. It did not surprise me
to learn that on the way to the hall where his father’s body lay, Nabokov (who had taken the phone
call announcing the tragic event) had initially concealed from his mother the seriousness of the
situation which made the ride to the dead body feel to Nabokov as something “outside life” (VN:
RY 191-92 [Nabokov’s italics, zk]) It is also fairly likely that the psychological torture of that trip
and a number of visits with his Eastern Orthodox mother to the graveside of his father at Tegel-
Berlin Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Berlin supplied some of the details for “Gods.” I also
submit that Nabokov’s probable desire to have been present at the hall where his father was shot
while performing a heroic deed may have been the psychological cause of the balloonist Charles’s
not only becoming a character in “Gods” while losing the historical distinction as the first human
to be tossed up by hydrogen. Nabokov’s giving Charles a fictional son who would witness from
the ground his father’s tearful triumph and provide a shoulder for Charles to cry on (while those
mortal crowds both cheered on Charles and his balloon’s ascent and at the same time waved
goodbye to them both) speaks for itself about the emotionally mixed occasion. The supporting
fictional shoulder may have been the unconscious self-protection needed by a son whose strong
arms were not there to prevent his father’s death. Yet, despite Nabokov’s “blending” and “fusing”
portions of his life with the history of ballooning to effect “some inner resurrection,” there is no
re-valuation of his moral worth involved in the process.
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 57

Launches of first balloons were big public spectacles, with the magic of flight attracting
over 130,000 for the Montgolfier flight and over 400,000 for the partially crowd-funded Charles
flight from the Tuileries, the French royalty and Ben Franklin among them. The balloons of this
era, as depicted by observers and artists (See Fig. 2), were very colorful and often featured rainbow
motifs on their envelopes as if trying to outdo the rainbows as the most colorful events in the sky.
The heavens, once a domain reserved only for gods, became a stage for the display of human
ingenuity, aspiration, and freedom. Here is Charles’ account of his first flight: “Nothing will ever
quite equal that moment of total hilarity that filled my whole body at the moment of take-off. I felt
we were flying away from the Earth and all its troubles forever. It was not mere delight. It was a
sort of physical ecstasy!” (Holmes, Falling Upwards, Chapter 6.) One cannot blame Nabokov for
seeking in story-writing the “wild magic” of ecstatic release from mind-bending grief.

Fig. 2. The Charliere, Charles’s hydrogen filled balloon, with Charles levitating

The apostrophe
Ballooning in the last decades of the 18th century in France provided, just as grief does,
a new vantage point from which to view ourselves, our world, and our gods. Nabokov never
abandoned the practice of picturing himself among divinities.19 Having in an early poem (May
1923) declared that we are “the larvae/caterpillars of angels,” (Stikhi 105), in October 1925 he
celebrated the finishing of his first novel with this perhaps not entirely playful description: “I
understand how God as he created the world found this a pure, thrilling joy. We are translators of
God’s creation, his little plagiarists and imitators, we dress up what he wrote, as a charmed
58 Nabokov Studies

commentator sometimes gives an extra grace to a line of genius” (Nabokov to Elena Nabokov, 13
October 1925, quoted in Boyd, Russian Years 245).
The story of ballooning within the story of “Gods,” however, is not simply one of ecstatic or
even strictly successful aeronautic exploits. Nabokov’s narrator ends the balloon portion of the
story by referring to Arthur Charles Hubert Latham‘s failed efforts to be the first to fly over the
English Channel and collect a $5, 000 prize. Nabokov depicts Latham sitting on his sinking
airplane, smoking a cigarette while watching his rival Bleriot fly overhead to “England’s sugary
shores” to collect the prize. While Latham’s crash and water-landing are factual, the historical
Latham was actually asleep while Bleriot flew across the Channel taking advantage of a break in
the weather.20
While the story within the story ends on a pessimistic note, the actual ending of “Gods,”
despite the wife’s grieving at the son’s graveside, seems to allow the narrator to take flight from
the trash of the vacant lot next to the cemetery and begin composing an imaginary address to
crowds of invisible gods. The description of the vacant lot calls for a closer look but first requires
some biographical context. Shortly after the death of his father, Nabokov comforted his mother
with the idea of a family reunion: "We shall again see him, in an unexpected but completely
natural paradise, in a country where everything is radiance and fineness. He will walk towards us
in our common bright eternity. . . . Everything will return. In the way that in a certain time the
hands of the clock come together again"' (Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part, 181—82). By this point
in the discussion, I take “Gods” to be Nabokov’s somewhat unsuccessful effort to learn how to
grieve properly, that is to say, how to balance the need for forgetting against the urge to remember,
an urge he found driving him out of his mind. I judge the effort unsuccessful since Nabokov kept
returning to the story’s ending scene in two more works. “Gods” was published in 1923. Nine
years later, for the tenth anniversary of his father’s death, in 1932 Nabokov would write “Vecher
na pustyre” (“Evening on a Vacant Lot/In memory V.D.N.” (Stikhi 246–48), and not only revisit
the final three paragraphs of “Gods” but poetically bring about the return of his father, a return
he had envisioned in a letter to his mother. The poem ends with Nabokov’s famous grief-
relieving if not death-denying apostrophe to his dead father: “You have not changed much since
you died.”

The final imagery

Grief counselors tell us that people who have experienced a loss will attempt to conjure up
the dead by poring over old photographs, letters, and their memories of the dead. It is their way
of visiting their dead, of using grief as a way of finding comfort. And of keeping the dead alive. In
a memoir detailing the process of coping with the grief following his wife’s death, Julian Barnes
describes one step of this process as figuring out “what happiness is there in just the memory of
happiness?" and the paradoxes such a step creates:
This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact
that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not
exist.
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 59

(Levels of Life, https://books.google.com/books?id=BZnLihfzFjEC&)

It is in that sense that we should understand the narrator of “Gods” when he repeatedly claims
that there is no death. He exists in the realm in which his son exists, directs his fables at the son,
and believes that the son can hear him. If we take this sentiment as having grown out of Nabokov’s
sense of his father’s continued presence in Nabokov’s life even after his father’s death, then the
puzzling final paragraphs of “Gods” are just the first of Nabokov’s three efforts to find a proper
aesthetic form in which to mourn his father. Just as Emerson had grieved Waldo in four different
genres, Nabokov would bring his refracting prism to the same grief-inscribed formulaic set of items
in a short story (“Gods”), a poem “Evening on a Vacant Lot,” and a novel (The Gift). Those items
are: the factory stacks, the dust, a dusty vacant lot, the dog, the smashed tin can, the soundscape,
and the ending apostrophe/reflection on the nature of death. In The Garland Companion, in his
entry on The Gift, Alexander Dolinin has examined in detail the links between the poem and the
novel, so my task here is to point out the previously undiscussed earlier case of Nabokovian
recycling and auto-sourcing, or the close connection between the respective ending vocabularies
of the short story and of the poem. To make the comparison clearer, I have color-coded the
recurrent and synchronized images:

“Gods” “Evening on a Vacant Lot: In Memory of V.D.N.” (1932)

The cemetery is already near. … an islet of
vernal white and green amid some dusty
vacant land. …Beyond the vacant lot,
factory buildings, buoyant brick
behemoths, float in the azure mist. At my
feet, a squashed tin glints rustily inside a
funnel of sand. Around me, silence and a
kind of spring emptiness. There is no death.
The wind comes tumbling upon me from
behind like a limp doll and tickles my neck
with its downy paw. There can be no death.
Blinking, a fiery eye looks,
through the fingerlike black stacks
of a factory, at weedy flowers
and a deformed tin can.
Across the vacant lot in darkening dust
I glimpse a slender hound, with snow-white coat.
Lost, I presume. But in the distance sounds
insistently and tenderly a whistling.
And in the twilight toward me a man
comes, calls. I recognize
your energetic stride. You haven’t
changed much since you died.
60 Nabokov Studies

Here is the table of resemblances extracted from the story and the poem:
“Gods” (1923) “Evening on a Vacant Lot: In Memory of V.D.N.” (1932)
dusty vacant land vacant lot in darkening dust
factory buildings fingerlike black stacks of a factory

azure mist the twilight

squashed tin deformed tin can
silence whistling
downy paw slender hound, with snow-white coat
There can be no death. You haven’t changed much since you died.
Fig. 3: Table of obsessive echoes

While Nabokov would not have appreciated my importing T.S. Eliot’s theories and
terminology into a discussion of Nabokovian work, the very similar configuration of the images
listed above makes them a textbook example of what Eliot, in a discussion of another father’s
complexly mourned death and afterlife (“Hamlet and his Problems”), called “objective correlative.”
In explaining why he did not consider Hamlet a great work, Eliot resurrected the term coined by
Washington Allston and declared that “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Hamlet the play
fails precisely because “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible,
because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (Selected Essays 145). In one sense the
irksomeness of “Gods” comes from the same source, an un-identifiable formula for an emotion
which nonetheless exists in excess of the story’s facts. Or more correctly, the emotion driving the
narrator exists outside the story’s facts.
Considered as a story about emotions generated by the death of a child, “Gods” fails by not
devoting much attention to such a plot or to the effect of the child’s death on the parents.
Considered as an example of Nabokov “seeking a public path for [the] easement” of his “private
despair” (SO 224) over his father’s death and the manner of that death, the story succeeds by
revealing the complexity of public mourning which, having been encrypted, reflected, and
refracted through Nabokov’s prism, metaphorically made his father into one of the “rainbow
gods” and then lifted up Nabokov to the realm in which such rainbow gods reside: “My father
was, indeed, a very active man, but as often happens with the children of famous fathers, I viewed
his activities through a prism of my own, which split into many enchanting colors the rather
austere light my teachers glimpsed” (S,M 131 ). “Gods” ends as the narrator opens his arms for a
“vast embrace,” notices his skin “covered with multicolored sparkles” presumably caused by the
sun’s shining through some prismatic bezel, and imagines that he is about to apostrophize
“rainbow-colored gods” on the subject of his just discovered understanding of the world’s beauty.
While we are not told what that understanding is, and while the multicolored sparkles may very
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 61

well be caused not by his turning into a rainbow but by his seeing his skin though “the radiant
rainbows of joyous tears, ”the effect of the story is that the narrator has glimpsed something
comforting about the balance between the imagination’s free will and the for-the-moment
beneficent hand of fate. Such glimpsing has given him what Nabokov calls “the rainbow edge”21
and has furthermore elevated him to some aesthetic and psychological realm where he can address
gods and where in memory, metaphor, or defense mechanism Nabokov’s levitating father still
resides.22 The narrator of “Evening on the Vacant Lot” is similarly placeless, feeling himself “lost,
melting in the air and sunset,” but both narrators appear to be experiencing a disruption of what
in The Gift is called “the triple formula of human existence: irrevocability, unrealizability,
inevitability” (111). The story’s critics may still find it confusing, inept, or even irksome, but
grief’s “words have no borders” phase (in which language is the repository of all that has been
lost) seems to compensate for such losses. That “adjustment” may very well have been the
necessary first step for the suddenly fatherless Nabokov to begin remapping the traumatized
terrain of his deliberately crypted psyche in search of inspiration which he already saw as “inner
resurrection.” Whether he ever succeeded in such remapping in this story is still open for debate,
but we do know that sentiments such as “there is no death” and “words have no borders” would
find their respective echoes even a quarter of a century later in “nobody will ever die” (Speak,
Memory) and “death is but a question of style” (Bend Sinister 241).

While after the death of their son, Lidian Emerson wished that she had never been born
and Emerson was unable to see the “dishonored landscape” afresh despite the promised
consolations of Christianity, after the death of his father Nabokov seems to have deliberately
sought a way to rejuvenate and enliven whatever facets of his capacity for wonder had been
deadened by the experience of death. Whether the death of Nabokov’s father became a portal to
what some of his critics have called the otherworld or whether Nabokov hung on to what Philip
Fisher in a non-Nabokovian context calls “covert religious feelings under an aesthetic guise"23
matters as little as knowing that rainbows are actually optical illusions.

Works Cited

Alexandrov, Vladimir, ed. The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland,
1995. Print.
Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1981. Print
The Apocryphal New Testament, translation and notes by M. R. James. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1924.
Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. New York: Vintage, 2014.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
-----. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.
62 Nabokov Studies

Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok.” B. Johnson
(trans.), preface to The Wolf Word: A Cryptonymy by Abraham and Torok.
----.“Points…. Interviews, 1974-1994. Meridian, 1995.)
---- “No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives).” C. Porter and P.
Lewis (trans.). Diacritics (Summer 1984): 20–31.
----. The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascal-Ann Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: UChicago P, 2001.
Diment, Galya. "'Nabokov' Doesn't Rhyme with 'Love'? On Love and Control in Speak, Memory."
Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 10: 3-4 (Aug 1989): 275-83.
Dragunoiu, Dana. Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism. Evanston: Northwestern UP,
2011. Print.
Elliot, Brian A. Bleriot, Herald of an Age. Tempus, 2000. 110-35. Print.
Elliot, T.S. Selected Essays. Faber, 1932. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Complete Works; With a Biographical Introduction and Notes by Edward
Waldo Emerson, and a General Index Volume 2. Palala Press 2016.
-----. Emerson in his Journals, ed Joel Porte. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
-----. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. William H.
Gilman et al., 16 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960-1982.
-----. Nature and Other Essays.
https://books.google.com/books?id=j8ld3fVa0i0C&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&dq#v=onepag
e&q&f=false
Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Part. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977.
Fisher, Philip. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1999.
Goethe, J.W. Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective affinities). Munchen: Winkler, 1972 [1809]
Green, Geoffrey, Freud and Nabokov (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1988).
Freud, Sigmund. Sigmund Freud Collected Papers (5 Volume Set). James Strachey (Editor),
Riviere (Translator) Basic Books 1959
Meyer, Priscilla. Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Wesleyan UP,
1989. Print.
Morris, Paul D. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Bend Sinister. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print
-----. The Gift. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.
- - -. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print.
----. The Man from the U.S.S.R. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
- - -. Pnin. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Print.
- - -. Selected Poems. Ed. Thomas Karshan. New York: Knopf, 2012. Print.
- - -. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.
- - -. The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Vintage International, 1997. Print.
- - -. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
Scholz, Nora. “… essence has been revealed to me“: Umkreisungen des Nondualen im Prosawerk von
Vladimir Nabokov. München: Frank & Timme, 2014. Print.
 Nabokov, Grief, and Repetition 63

Shrayer, Maxim D. The World of Nabokov's Stories. Austin: UTexas P, 1999.

Print.
Trousdale, Rachel. Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination. Palgrave, 2010. Print.

Notes:
1
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-aquarium

2
The Kubler-Ross theories were developed through interviews with the dying and thus may not be entirely relevant
in this case.

3
"The Ego and the Id" (1923) expands on "Mourning and Melancholia" arguing that the process of internalization is
universal and in fact a normal part of the “Oedipal Phase.”

4
Carlyle had no children.

5
One wishes that some voice within Emerson had reminded him that treating offspring as property was the purview
od the peculiar American institution Emerson had summed up admirably: “If you put the chains around the neck of
a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.” https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/biographies/emerson-
and-anti-slavery/

6
“The Infancy Gospel of Thomas” (II, 1–5), in The Apocryphal New Testament, translation and notes by M. R. James
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

7
Much later, in Strong Opinions, Nabokov would proclaim : “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 .” (45)

8
Goethe’s sentiment is a twist on the Eastern Orthodox liturgy for the dead which echoes with the phrase “Eternal
Memory, ” a phrase that assigns such a faculty to the newly dead and tasks the living with the work or remembrance.
In "Ultima Thule," Sineusov mourns his wife by writing to her on this very topic: "If you don't remember, then I
remember for you: the memory of you can pass, grammatically speaking at least, for your memory, and I am perfectly
willing to grant for the sake of an ornate phrase that if, after your death, I and the world still endure, it is only because
you recollect the world and me.”

9
This definition is the one Freud gave before his own daughter died and before he re-evaluated the fort-da game his
grandson played to manage his feelings about his mother’s absence.

10
Gay Wilson Allen explains: “Ralph Waldo Emerson disliked his first name, and his family and friends called him
‘Waldo’ after he requested them to do so while he was in college. . . he had six cousins named Ralph . . . [making] it
difficult for Ralph Emerson to attain an identity of his own.” Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New
York: Viking, 1981): vi– vii.

11
Ditto for Iulii Aikenwald: “And it so happens that this person, the person himself, whose image our soul
painstakingly assimilated, suddenly dies, and then ... what then? Perplexity, absurdity, feeling of some kind of
tremendous internal discrepancy…”

12
Nabokov seems to have understood Iona Kuzmich’s problem in Chekhov’s story “Misery,” but still remained
reluctant to share his grief, a trait he loans to Van in Ada who, as Rachel Trousdale points out “mourns his
estrangement from Ada in untranslated English-French puns” (60).

13
I used the following books to decipher the additions, deletions, and substitutions Nabokov made in his version of
French hot air balloon history:
64 Nabokov Studies

Ege, Lennart A. T. Balloons and Airships. Editor of the English edition, Kenneth Munson from translation by Erik
Hildesheim. New York: Macmillan, 1974

Kirschner, Edwin J. Aerospace Balloons – From Montgolfiere to Space. Fallbrook, Calif.: Aero Publishers, Inc., 1985.

Macmillan, Norman. Great Flights and Air Adventures, From Balloons to Spacecraft. London: G. Bell, 1964.

Rolt, L.T.C. The Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning - 1783-1903. New York: Walker and Company, 1966.

Holmes, Richard. Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Pantheon, 2013

14
As in “the stained-glass casements that colored the sunlight orange and green and violet on the verandas of Russian
country houses” (Pnin 145–46).

15
“Sybil's personality, she said, had a rainbow edge as if a little out of focus.”

16
"The insolent Christmas tree,” wrote Novodvortsev, "was afire with every hue of the rainbow."

17
Dana Dragunoiu explains that Nabokov’s “identification with his father’s liberalism,” the only politics Nabokov
professed, “was not simply a general attitude of mind, but a coherent and historically specific view about the legitimate
boundaries of human knowledge, the proper functions of government, and the unconditional value of the right to self-
determination” (Dragunoiu 30-31).

18
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud discusses the game/repetition compulsion as the child’s repeated
ritualized effort to transform an unhappy situation (a parent’s absence) into one in which the child to some degree
controls. The child tosses a cotton reel tied to string away from himself to where it could no longer be seen
(oo/Fort/gone) only to pull it back into view with a gleeful and relieved ah/There! In Nabokov and Freud, Geoffrey
Greene has read Nabokov’s writing as indulging in a very similar kind of game of converting loss into a semblance of
pleasure and control.

19
Человек - подобие Божие, вещь - подобие человеческое. Человек, который делает вещь своим Богом,
уподобляется ей. Тогда получается полный круг: вещь, Бог, человек, вещь, - а для ума прелестен полный круг.
Man-likeness of God, thing- likeness of man. The man who makes a thing his God resembles it. Then/Thus a complete
circle is obtained: a thing, God, a man, a thing, but for the mind, a lovely full circle.

20
Elliot, Brian A. Bleriot, Herald of an Age, 110-35.

21
In a letter to Edmund Wilson, Nabokov says he had “toyed with” using the title Rainbow Edge for Speak, Memory
so that it would “suggest the glass edge—'The Prismatic Bezel' (of Sebastian Knight fame)." VN: AY

22
Although “Nabokov did not care to fly” (VN: AY) he nonetheless imagined himself as having the 30,000 foot view:
“I’m the shuttlecock above the Atlantic, and how bright and blue it is there, in my private sky, far from the pigeonholes
and the clay pigeons” (SO 117).

23
Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences.