Fathers, Sons and Impostors: Pushkin's Trace in The Gift

Author(s): Monika Greenleaf

Source: Slavic Review , Spring, 1994, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 140-158
Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500329

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Fathers, Sons and Impostors: Pushkin's Trace
in The Gift

Monika Greenleaf

Korua qeJIOBeK yMHpaeT,

143meHA1OTCA ero nOpTpeTbi.
(When a human being dies,
his portraits change.)

-Anna Akhmatova, 1940

Nabokov's The Gift opens with the mock specificity of a date: 1 April
192-, which immediately, we are informed, calls attention to the Rus-
sian novelistic practice of "honest fictionality."' The long metaliterary
excursus draws attention away from the specificity of one particular
date, which the author, as it were, refuses to complete: on 1 April 1922
Nabokov's father, the respected statesman Vladimir Dmitrievich Na-
bokov, was buried in Berlin, three days after his heroic, though for-
tuitous death in a right-wing assassination attempt on a former Kadet
ally, P.N. Miliukov.2 All that is left of one of the great tragedies of
Nabokov's life is the ironic precipitate of the self-canceling date and
the fact that for the protagonist of the novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cher-
dyntsev, it is "moving day," a move from one life into another. Is there
any connection between the protagonist's pushkinian name and the
project that the author bequeaths him: to mourn his father? Many of
Nabokov's heroes will face a similar predicament; in John Burt Foster's
words, "even as they struggle to recall their personal pasts, they must
also come to terms with cultural memories that reflect current interests
of their most immediate audiences."3 Nabokov's emigre audience also
hungered for an elegiac work that would at last do justice to Russia's
losses, yet, as Mandel'shtam put it, "There is nothing less conducive to
poetic inspiration than ears waiting to hear."4 How was Nabokov to

1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with collaboration of the
author (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 11. All quotations in English will be from this
edition. This article was originally presented as a paper at Stanford University, U.C.
Berkeley and Harvard. I would like to take the opportunity to thank those audiences
for their constructive and open-minded comments, in particular: Hans Ulrich Gum-
brecht, Robert Hughes, William Mills Todd III, Cathy Frierson, Elizabeth Ransome
and Svetlana Boym. I owe special thanks to Irina Paperno and John Burt Foster for
their very helpful comments and attentive reading of my manuscript.
2. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 189-95.
3. John Burt Foster, Jr., Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 40.
4. Osip Mandel'shtam, "Word and Culture," in The Complete Critical Prose and
Letters, ed. Jane Gary Harris (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 114.

Slavic Review 53, no. 1 (Spring 1994)

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 141

perform this pressing elegiac act without compromising his artistic and
human privacy?
Let me review a few elements of the context in which The Gift
appeared. First, the emigration: for all its hardship, heartbreak, the
claustrophobic proximity of fellow expatriates who didn't belong to
one's "set" and the internecine strife over political and cultural differ-
ences that are always writ large in any miniature society,5,the emigra-
tion restored to writers an audience, a literary institution and a style
of communication that had not existed in Russian literature since the
salons of the 1820s.6 That wonderful semipermeable membrane be-
tween reality and literature, which allowed readers to anticipate that
they might find themselves or their Petersburg friends wandering into
the pages of Eugene Onegin or frequenting the milieu from which it had
arisen, had disappeared with the formation of a literary relation be-
tween author and public that was on a much larger, more anonymous
scale. The first thing we notice about The Gift is the reminiscent shim-
mer of its romantic irony: the way it now addresses, then represents
its fellow-emigre audience inside the text; while the subject "I," in
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's and Jean-Luc Nancy's terms, now projects
or disperses himself (the better to ensure his power, of course) into
the multiplicity of personages or "characters" that he constructs, now
dissolves his fiction to reveal the god-like imagination behind its in-
carnations-the creative matrix itself.7 By this act of ironic self-dou-
bling ("Vsegda ia rad zametit' raznost' mezhdu Oneginym i mnoi" [I'm
always glad to note the disparity between Onegin and me])8 the author
creates a labile, deniable relationship with his fictional protagonist,
without renouncing their common lyrical substratum.
Nabokov may treat emigre society with undisguised disdain and
mockery, yet he is addressing readers who not only know the same
street names and shops, the rented rooms and shabby kulturnost' (cul-
turedness) of emigre Berlin, but also share unspoken values and atti-
tudes: intensely elegiac, yet intolerant of others' vulgar sentiments and
memories; adversarial toward both "them"-the lowly native, "host"
culture-and the surviving Soviet citizens, Russian by geographical
misnomer only, in whose hands every cultural pursuit, from poetry to

5. Marc Raeff gives a rather objective account in Russia Abroad: A Cultural History
of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Nina
Berberova's memoir (The Italics Are Mine, trans. Philippe Radley [New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1969]) reflects some of those problems.
6. Here I am referring to the set of institutional paradigms identified by William
Mills Todd III in his analysis of the successive structures of nineteenth century Russian
literary life, from court to salon to journal. See his Fiction and Society in the Age of
Pushkin: Ideology, Institutions, and Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986),
chaps. 1-2.
7. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L'Absolu litt&raire: Theorie de la
litt&rature du romantisme allemand (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 204.
8. Alexander Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin, chap. 1, st. LVI. For a fuller discussion of
romantic irony in Pushkin, please see the chapter on Eugene Onegin in my Pushkin and
Romantic Fashion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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 142 Slavic Review

chess, has become a tawdry parody; convinced that they have brought
the real Russia like contraband into exile with them.9 Exile introduces
duality into time and space: what is real is what is absent, recoverable
only by means of linguistic signs.10 Participation in literature becomes
an act of communion with a spiritualized, noumenal Russia." The
issue of legitimacy naturally comes to the fore in such a context: which
strand of Russia's cultural inheritance represented the "true Russia"
that the emigration should preserve, who was its "true father" (and
who wasn't); and secondly, who then were his "true" heirs?
From another point of view, the emigration's preoccupation with
literary succession is a natural by-product of the work of mourning. In
his book on The English Elegy Peter Sachs has shown that elegiac forms
retain many traces of their origins in funeral rites by which the sur-
vivors not only expressed their private grief, but also competed for the
dead's inheritance. By transcribing inchoate pain and the formlessness
of death itself into "the language of the fathers,"'-2 an inherited and
public language of elegiac form, the elegiac poet gives his society a
cultural mechanism for consolation and survival. By "beginning again,"
inserting his own grief into the profoundly repetitive rhythmic struc-
tures, rhymes and mythic figures of elegy, he restores patterned control
over pain, events and time. In particular, by dramatizing his own sit-
uation, the mourner places himself outside it, no longer the victim of
separation or loss, but its author-even, in a sense, its romantic ironist.
A great elegy is, however, never merely a nostalgic tribute. Its act
of self-assertion vis-a-vis the other claimants to the inheritance is
grounded in a painful and often unwilling submission of the self s love,
rage and individual experience to a publicly intelligible and authori-
tative language; it trades the infinity and uniqueness of its own feeling
for an isolate public artifact and for the cultural authority that accrues
from this act of sublimation. Often it is a preceding elegiac poet or
father figure who is being mourned, and whose authority is thus being
simultaneously celebrated and supplanted. The act of elegiac mourn-
ing is reciprocal: it asserts both the authority of the true father, perhaps
out of many pretenders, and of the true son out of many rivals for his
mastery. To put it another way, it invents its own genealogy. Thus an
implicit part of the elegiac drama is the aggressive purging of false
artistic models, false mourning, imposter fathers and sons, false starts.
The ferocious post-revolutionary struggle over Pushkin's inherit-
ance that began in Russia and continued with renewed energy and

9. This is Nabokov's phrase.

10. See Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1986).
11. For a more developed treatment of this theme, see Vladimir E. Alexandrov,
Nabokov's Othervorld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
12. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985),
1-37. I have retained this vestige of the psychoanalytic concepts Sacks skillfully inte-
grates into his poetic theory, without intending to invoke any explicitly "freudian"
implications.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 143

pathos in the emigration, of which Khodasevich and the formalists

were vocal but far from the only participants,13 was clearly such an
elegiac competition. For all its scorn of historical topicality, The Gift,
Sergei Davydov has shown, was the culmination of this crescendoing
argument in the literary press of emigre Russia.14 Led by Vladislav
Khodasevich and Georgii Adamovich, that debate was essentially about
the adequateness of inherited poetic forms to the unprecedented ca-
lamity of twentieth century Russian experience; in polemical short-
hand: "pushkinian classicism" versus the authentic "human document"
of pain.'5
It is clear which side Nabokov was on. As late as 1962, in the preface
to the English edition of The Gift, he continued to call Khodasevich
Russia's greatest twentieth century poet.16 A harmless blind spot? Or
a deliberate manipulation of literary genealogy? It was apparently im-
portant to Nabokov to discount the poetry that was still somehow being
written in the country he had crossed out of his mental atlas. ("There
is no Soviet literature," he scribbled on a catalogue of current Soviet
publications.)17 How could a writer who had given up his own language
in order to continue writing not choose to believe that Russian poetry
had spoken its last authentic Russian word at the same time? Khoda-
sevich's increasingly compressed and scanty lyrics enacted that epigra-
matic and tragic closure. If, as critics have long assumed, the figure of
the poet Koncheev was modeled at least in part on Khodasevich, it is
precisely in his capacity as Russia's last poet, the one who ends or
finishes (konchaet) the tradition.'8 Koncheev and his poetry hover ap-

13. Concurrently with Nabokov, Marina Tsvetaeva was writing her two brilliant
prose studies, "Moi Pushkin" and "Pushkin i Pugachev"; during her years of enforced
silence Anna Akhmatova worked on the series of studies collected later under the title
Zapiski o Pushkine; earlier, of course, there were Briusov's "Moi Pushkin," Man-
del'shtam's "Pushkin i Skriabin," and Khodasevich's "Koleblemyi trenozhnik," among
many others.
14. See Sergei Davydov, "Weighing Nabokov's Gift on Pushkin's Scales," in Cul-
tural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age, eds. Boris
Gasparov, Robert P. Hughes and Irina Paperno (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), 415-28.
15. See John E. Malmstad, "Khodasevich and Formalism: A Poet's Dissent," in
Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance: A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich, eds. Robert
LouisJackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven: Yale Center for International and Area
Studies Publications, 1985), 68-81; David M. Bethea, Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 317-31; R. Hagglund, "The Russian Emigre
Debate of 1928 on Criticism," Slavic Review 32 (September 1973): 515-26, and "The
Adamovich-Khodasevich Polemics," Slavic and East EuropeanJournal 20 (Fall 1976): 239-
52.
16. Nabokov, "Foreword" to The Gift (1988), 8.
17. Reported in Brian Boyd's account of Nabokov's years at Cornell (1948-1950),
in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991),
134.
18. The origin of the rumor about Khodasevich appears to be Berberova's The
Italics Are Mine, 566. See Footnote 20 to "The Gift" in David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov:
A Critical Study of the Novels (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 190. The
more obvious phonetic association of Koncheev's name is with conch (Latin concha:

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 144 Slavic Review

provingly over Fyodor's fledgling works in The Gift, but the story ac-
tually told is about the progressive abandonment of Russian poetry
and the legitimation of the form that takes its place: a novel liberated
from "the greybeards of Russian literature"'9 and restored to its true
pushkinian lineage.20 Indeed, The Gift's determined russocentrism sug-
gests the genealogical omission not only of rival contemporary poets
but also of European modernists like Proust andJoyce who had already
turned the fictional autobiography into a simultaneous demonstration
and investigation of poetic memory and image-making.2'
Khodasevich's response to Nabokov's novels set the tone for almost
all subsequent critical reception. In his article "On Sirin" (1937), he
identified the formalist nucleus of each work, up to but not including
The Gift, showing that devices "turn out to be its indispensably impor-
tant characters" and Nabokov's main intent not to create a portrait of
the artist as a young man, and certainly not of his "life and times," but
"to show how devices live and work."22 Since then, critics have eagerly
and ingeniously performed the role of Nabokov's "good readers," prov-
ing that the heroine of The Gift is indeed not Zina but Nabokov's
allegorical history of Russian literature, its hero not Fyodor Godunov
but the shklovskian "knight's move" of artistic distortion (sdvig), which
Nabokov shares? appropriates? parodies? in his own representation of
the irreducible otherness of genius.23 By this logic, the closer we are
to formalism, the closer we are to Pushkin-an equation I am not sure
Khodasevich intended to make.24
In a recent study, Irina Paperno has shown that those very "devices"
with which Fyodor Godunov rewrites the literary past and demon-

pearl-oyster or trumpet), suggesting, on the contrary, the glorious continuation of

Russian poetry.
19. The phrase is Iurii Tynianov's, in his essay "Mnimyi Pushkin," Poetika. Istoriia
literatury. Kino (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 78-92.
20. Simon Karlinsky was the first to make this point in "Vladimir Nabokov's Novel
Dar as a Work of Literary Criticism: A Structural Analysis," Slavic and East European
Studies 7 (1963): 284-90; and "Nabokov and Chekhov: The Lesser Russian Tradition,"
in Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, eds. Alfred Appel, Jr. and Charles New-
man (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 7-16; as well as Davydov.
21. That The Gift really should be read in the context of the European modernist
prose it ignores is suggested by John Burt Foster's theoretically profound and inter-
textually precise discussion of Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (see note
3). Interestingly, Nabokov read Joyce's Ulysses in Cambridge shortly after his father's
death and was acquainted with Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu by the time he
began work on Dar, although he insisted that he "studied" it only in 1935-1936 "when
he was already fully formed as an artist" (see Foster, 52-53).
22. Vladislav Khodasevich, "On Sirin," in Vozrozhdenie 1937, trans. Michael H.
Walker, in Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1982), 61-64. Quoted by Irina Paperno, "How Nabokov's Gift Is Made," in Lit-
erature, Culture, and Society in the Modern Age: Festschrift in Honor ofJoseph F
Stanford Slavic Studies 4, no. 2 [1992]): 312.
23. Paperno does not make this clear.
24. See Malmstad's nuanced reading of Khodasevich's critical statements in Jack-
son and Rudy, 68-81.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 145

strates art's utter independence from "life" (that is, the montage of
documentary sources, addition of color and sound, the realization of
metaphor and metaphoricization of life) are, after all, embedded in a
historical context-the post-revolutionary critical doctrine of formal-
ism.25 Fyodor reworks the travelers' notes and Chernyshevsky memoirs
in precisely the same way that Shklovskii's Tolstoy and Tynianov's
Pushkin were shown to have assembled "montages" of historical sources
in War and Peace and "Journey to Arzrum."26 Even as she has coll
paragraphs from the dazzling array of travel and memoir sources from
which Nabokov assembled Fyodor's texts, Paperno has indicated that
she is merely following Nabokov's instructions-"a chain of indicators
carefully prepared for the reader-investigator" (at one point she even
has that reader follow Fyodor to the Berlin Library and pore, Tatyana-
like, over pencil-marks left in the margins of those documents). Pa-
perno has not suppressed the ambivalence that Nabokov critics must
feel on having "cracked the code": aren't they just picking up the trail
of crumbs Nabokov left especially for them-formalist-structuralist, de-
vice-minded readers?27
Concentrating on those parts of the book where Fyodor is clearly
rewriting antecedent texts, "good readers" of The Gift steer a wide berth
around the rest. For example, Paperno has collated a passage from
Grum-Grzhimailo's Description of aJourney to Western China with "a char-
acteristic example of the manner in which Fyodor/Nabokov works with
his material, the description of a stop at lake Kuka-Nor:

Placing one foot on a fragment of rock and leaning slightly on the

handle of his net, my father looks down from a high spur, from the
glacier boulders of Tanegma, at the lake Kuka-Nor-a huge spread of
dark blue water. There down below on the golden steppes a herd of
kiangs rushes past, and the shadow of an eagle flicks across the cliffs;
overhead there is perfect peace, silence, transparency ... and again I
ask myself what Father is thinking about when he is not busy collect-
ing and stands there like that, quite still ... appearing as it were on
the crest of my recollection, torturing me, enrapturing me-to the
point of pain, to an insanity of tenderness, envy and love, tormenting
my soul with his inscrutible solitariness."28

It seems curious to me that the planting of this tremendously emo-

tional description of his father in the midst of Fyodor's nearly pla-
giaristic paraphrase does not even deserve a mention in the list of his
literary devices and distortions. Perhaps critics play into what Paperno
has suggested might be Nabokov's "semiotic totalitarianism,,"29 by

25. Paperno, 295-322.

26. Tynianov's article "O Puteshestvii v Arzrum" was, however, published only in
1936, in Vremennik Pushkinskoi komissii, II (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1936), so the
probability of this is open to doubt.
27. Paperno, 313-14.
28. Ibid., 299.
29. The phrase is Gary Saul Morson's, from Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and
Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 84.

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 146 Slavic Review

lowing him posthumously to define their paths of inquiry and labeling

all others "vulgar"? It seems to me that the concept of sdvig or distor-
tion can also be used to illuminate the way that Nabokov converted
his triple mourning-for Russia, for his father and for his native lan-
guage-into the narrative structure, with its unique blend of lyrical
pathos and romantic irony, which is the essential legacy of Eugene One-
gin.
Finally, as John Burt Foster has established in Nabokov's Art of Mem-
ory, to focus on Nabokov's and Fyodor's creative responses to the deaths
of their respective fathers is to bring The Gift squarely into the line of
nabokovian fictions which, like Proust's, obsessively explore "the con-
flict between two modes of writing-the fictive and the autobiograph-
ical" or, more precisely, "the vacillation between strict fidelity and
creative reworking in the very constitution of the mnemonic image."30
We then see the novel acting out the characteristic modernist, not to
say proustian, tension between the glorification of aesthetic distortion
and the sharp desire expressed in the opening of "Mademoiselle 0":
"Have I really salvaged her from fiction?"3'
Nabokov's diary entry for 28 March, written the very night of his
father's murder, is probably the closest one can come to a "human
document" when one is dealing with Nabokov.32 Even as he recorded
his journey through the unrecognizable Berlin streets toward the grow-
ing certainty of his father's death, his memory traveled backward to
their last conversation the evening before, striving to recollect every
detail of his still casually living and breathing father, "before the shell
hardened," before the knowledge of death covered everything with its
monumental patina.

The night before he had been so happy, so kind. He laughed, he

fought with me when I began to demonstrate a boxing clinch. Then
everyone went off to bed, Father began to undress in his room and I
did the same in mine next door. We chatted through the open door,
talked of Sergey, of his strange, abnormal inclinations [i.e., his ho-
mosexuality]. Then Father helped me put my trousers under the press,
and drew them out, turning the screws, and said, laughing: "That must
hurt them." Dressed in pyjamas I sat on the arm of the leather chair,
and Father, squatting, cleaned the shoes he had taken off. We were
talking now about the opera Boris Godunov. He tried to remember how
and when Vanya returns after his father has sent him off. Couldn't
recall. At last I went to bed and hearing Father also going off asked
him to give me the newspapers, he passed them through the slit of
the parted doors-I didn't even see his hands. And I remember, that
movement seemed creepy, ghostly-as if the sheets had thrust them-
selves through...

30. Foster, 31-36.

31. Ibid., 35.
32. Boyd reports that the diary entry is actually a copy made in Nabokov's moth-
er's handwriting, which might increase the possibility of retrospective tampering (see
Boyd, The Russian Years, 193 and 556).
33. Ibid., 192.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 147

On first glance, Nabokov's scene of father-son bonding is touch-

ingly ordinary, from the obligatory physical tussling and confirmation
of their bond by the ostracism of the other, "abnormal" brother, to
the deflection onto objects and into language of their laughing manly
aggressiveness: "That must hurt them." Physical closeness was replaced
by the thread of their elliptical conversation through the open door
between their rooms, and then finally by the silent passage of the
newspapers through the now slitted door-"as if the sheets had thrust
themselves through"-in seamless gradations of parting. Not a single
detail of his father's last words and gestures would be wasted. As though
reflected in a distorting mirror, Fyodor Godunov will find his last med-
itation on Aleksandr Yakovlevich Chernyshevsky's death interrupted
and distracted by "two badly wrought bronze boxers, recently erected,
frozen in attitudes that completely disagreed with the reciprocal har-
mony of pugilism"; by the echoing in his head of the irrevocable line
"Never, never, never, never, never" with which King Lear parts from
Cordelia; and by the sight, glimpsed through the window of a cleaning
and pressing shop, of "a worker with devilish energy and an excess of
steam, as if in hell, torturing a pair of flat trousers."34 The details of
his father's last conversation, so three-dimensionally animated in their
proper context that Nabokov's trousers feel pain, remain a collection
of flat and unresuscitable objects in Fyodor's failed attempt at mourn-
ing the wrong man.
In the diary entry, Nabokov's effort to recover something like his
father's "last words" led him to Boris Godunov; then to an apparent
confusion or conflation of this opera with Glinka's Zhizn' za tsaria (Life
for the Tsar, later renamed Ivan Susanin),35 a Freudian substitution of
sorts, since there the adopted son Vanya does return to his father,
while Fyodor Godunov is mutilated by Dmitrii the Pretender's men;
and finally to a failure of memory: "Ne vspomnil." It is as if the son's
efforts to recollect every last word and gesture of his father have led
finally to a memory-lapse, a dead-end where memory shades impercep-
tibly into imagination, substitution and art. It seems to me that Na-
bokov was retrospectively transforming his casual last meeting with his
father into a scene of enigmatic paternal bequest, perhaps patterned
on the analogous scene in Boris Godunov. Certainly the Smuta-like post-
revolutionary chaos of Russian politics and V.D. Nabokov's prominent
and highly principled efforts to stem its tide made the analogy plau-
sible.
Pushkin's Boris Godunov passionately desires to bequeath his king-
dom to his son Fyodor; he feels that his own legacy of good government
has legitimated his son's claim to the title. By mid-play, however, Boris
finds himself hounded from all sides by the power of an empty name,
a shade, a "threatening adversary" (groznyi supostat): an impostor bear-
ing the name of the dead Tsarevich Dmitrii. It is Boris's failure to fight

34. The Gift, 286.

35. I am grateful to Robert P. Hughes for pointing this out to me; whether Na-
bokov's confusion is deliberate or not is among scholars a moot point.

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 148 Slavic Review

off the self- proliferating power of a rumor not with the literal achieve-
ments of his good government, which, as he complains, are constantly
turned against him, but with an act of commensurate verbal and sym-
bolic power that prevents him from passing on his legacy to his son.
Pushkin's play is concerned less with differentiating legitimate from
illegitimate authority than with dramatizing the power of language-
pustoe slovo-to rename and remake "reality," the princely gift of im-
posture.36 Pushkin shifted the idea of "pretending" or imposture
(samozvanstvo) from its traditional classification in Karamzin and the
chroniclers as a black sin against the divine order to the pinnacle of
a machiavellian scale of values. The most powerful character in Push-
kin's play is, after all, the modest monk Pimen, who uses his highly
selective memory to rewrite its plot-a key structural irony Nabokov
later showed he was quite aware of when, in Speak, Memory, he recalled
his boyhood impression of the opera: "My weak responsiveness to mu-
sic was completely overrun by the visual torment of not being able to
read over Pimen's shoulder."37
Amid the swirling historical events and violence of the Smuta, there
is one moment of stillness when father and son talk about maps, and
Boris seems briefly to glimpse the possibility of a different kind of
power he can bequeath to his son-or perhaps that he should learn
from him.

Ljapb
[...] A TbI, MOEi CbIH, qeM 3aHAT? 3TO qTO?

(Deoaop

TMepTeXK 3eMJ1H MOCKOBCKOHI; Haiiie uapCTBO

143 Kpa5I B Kpaii. BOT BHIHmb: TYT MOCKBa.
TYT HOBrOpOZ, TYT ACTpaxaHb. BOT Mope,
BOT riepmCKHe IpemyqHe jieca,
A BOT CH6Hpb. [. .]

Uapb

KaK xopomo! BOT Cia,AKHAi IIrO, ylIeHbq!

KaK C o6JIaKOB TbI MO)KCeLb o6o3peTb
Bce uapCTBO BUpyr: rpaHHLbI, rpaUbI, peKH. [. .]
Kor)a-HH6yZb, H CKOPO, MO)KeT 6bITb,

36. For a fuller discussion of Pushkin's assimilation of the karamzinian narrative

of samozvanstvo to the machiavellian and shakespearean conceptions of princely im-
provisation and imposture, see the chapter "'What's in a Name?': The Rhetoric of
Imposture in Boris Godunov," in my Pushkin and Romantic Fashion.
37. I thank John Burt Foster for pointing out this moment in Nabokov's Speak,
Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam's, 1966), 36. For interesting
modern readings of Boris Godunov, please see Caryl Emerson, Boris Godunov: Transpo-
sitions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 88-141; Kevin
Moss, "The Last Word in Fiction: On Significant Lies in Boris Godunov," Soviet and East
EuropeanJournal 32, no. 2 (1988): 187-97; Stephanie Sandler, Distant Pleasures: Alexander
Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 77-139.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 149

Bce o6jiaCT, KOTOPbIe TbI HbIHe

Il3o6pa3HJ1 TaK XHTPO Ha 6yMare,
Bce rioa PYKY UOCTaHYTCH TBOLO.

(And you, my son, what are you busy with? What's this?/Drawing of
Moscow's land; our tsardom/from end to end. So you see: here's Mos-
cow./Here's Novgorod, here's Astrakhan'. There's the sea,/there the
dense forests of Perm',/while there is Siberia.[ ...]
/How fine! Now that is the sweet fruit of scholarship!/As from the
clouds you can survey/the whole kingdom at once: borders, cities, riv-
ers.... /Someday, and soon, perhaps,/all the regions, which you have
just now/represented so cleverly on paper,/all these will be delivered
into your hands... .)38
When I suggest that Boris Godunov mediates between the fragmen-
tary realia of Nabokov's last conversation with his father, I do not mean
to identify only the issue of father-son legitimacy. I connect the sheets
of newspaper silently sliding through the last chink between his father
and himself with Pushkin's scene of symbolic bequest, because in that
scene the father recognizes and approves the potential power of his
son's representations-"which you have just now represented so clev-
erly on paper"-of Russia. In other words, it is the creative gift of
"pretending" or "self-naming," once Boris Godunov's own strong suit,
that is being passed on. It is just such a scene of paternal legitimation
that Fyodor Godunov pursues throughout Nabokov's novel.
Although the portrait of Fyodor Godunov's father in The Gift was
considered by his friends to be a very true likeness of V.D. Nabokov,
one major area of his life was eliminated by its author: his dedicated
career of legal reform, governmental service and constitutional law,
Boris Godunov-like in a period reminiscent of a latter-day Smuta, is
replaced in the novel by Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev's apolitical
naturalism and exaggerated contempt for everything merely historical
and human. Nabokov's father was instrumental in the formation of the
Duma of 1905, for which he was stripped of his academic position, led
the Kadets with Miliukov, was drafted and served in the war, and then
worked tirelessly to create a constitutional basis for the provisional
government which he later documented in one of the most important
historical memoirs of the period, The Provisional Government. As editor
of the journal Rul' he continued to lead the politically fractured Rus-
sian emigration.39 Godunov-Cherdyntsev's professional and intellec-
tual life inverts each of these details: a scholarly naturalist and ex-
plorer, he avoids the war in order to continue his monumental work

38. Alexander Pushkin, the scene "Tsarskie palaty" in Boris Godunov, Polnoe so-
branie sochinenii v desiati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), V: 225. My translation.
39. Boyd, 26-34, 54-67, 75-77, 11, 122-35, 138-44, 154-60, 188-91. Laura En-
gelstein provides a closer view of V.D. Nabokov as a forensic lawyer concerned with
progressive reform in the areas of prostitution, abortion, child abuse, women's rights
and homosexuality (see her The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-
de-Siecle Russia [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992], 68-86, 281).

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 150 Slavic Review

on butterflies of the Russian Empire, cares for the course of political

developments only insofar as they affect his immediate family and,
finally, irresponsibly disappears-not into death but into his last exotic
journey of exploration in Tibet.
In other words, the whole political-historical side of V.D. Nabokov's
life is elided, rewritten, leaving a vestigial trace only in the name Go-
dunov. The phenomenological events of his life are treated as a shell,
a dispensable, merely literal reality which may have constituted the
principal spiritual obstacle between the Nabokovs, father and son. The
biographical "reality" of his father, the respected career which was
available to everyone, was, in other words, the threatening impostor.
The son rewrote a father uniquely tailored to himself, factually false
but internally true to their shared nature. Nabokov's act of mourning
first of all involves the destruction of the public image of his father-
the career of humanitarian, progressive service, the social conscience,
regarded as a continuation of the humanitarian legacy of the "men of
the sixties"-in short, the crude phenomenological impostor from
which the father and son's intimate relationship must be reclaimed. It
is from this father, liberated from his "social conscience," that Fyodor
will receive a pushkinian blessing.
But first Fyodor has to perform a similar sdvig, or act of ironic
distancing, from the "chernyshevskian" environment of his own life.
Throughout the novel the Godunov-Cherdyntsevs are shadowed by the
ghostly resemblance of the modern Chernyshevsky clan and its familial
tragedy, indeed, by the common "mourning and melancholia" of the
emigration.40 When Yasha Chernyshevsky's tragic fate is proposed by
the mother as an appropriate subject for elegy, Fyodor refuses, yet
rehearses the story in his imagination. His first task is to differentiate
himself from his "semblable," his double, the sensitive young elegiac
poet Yasha Chernyshevsky, whom he resembles typologically in every
detail, and yet, he insists with an allergic repulsion, in essence not at
all. Yasha, whose name could be calqued as the Russian pronoun "ia"
(I) with a diminutive suffix, is a mockingly accurate simulacrum of
himself-the elegiac subject-minus the genius. The means of exor-
cism chosen is the plot of Eugene Onegin.41
Yasha is to Fyodor precisely what Lensky is in relation to the "I,"
or Pushkin-the-narrator, in Eugene Onegin. He is the commonplace im-
age of a young poet-black curls to the shoulders (or the close-cropped
haircut of the twentieth century Petersburg poet), quick responsiveness
to friendship, love and other impractical ideals, constant scribbling of
foggy and repetitive verses, a belief in words which have long since

40. Anne Nesbet has shown that a triangular suicide-pact similar to the one in
The Gift had been featured in the emigre press as a symptom of the generation's
spiritual malaise (see her "Suicide as Literary Fact in the 1920's," Slavic Review 50, no.
4 [Winter 1991], 827-35).
41. See the chapter, "The Sense of Not Ending: Romantic Irony in Eugene Onegin,"
in Pushkin and Romantic Fashion.

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 Pushkin's- Trace in The Gift 151

become threadbare. In Eugene Onegin Lensky is made to resemble a

slightly younger Pushkin, frozen in last year's intellectual and sartorial
fashions, precisely so that Pushkin could cruelly disengage himself from
his own superannuated image.
Not only did Nabokov recreate a contemporary Lensky figure in
Yasha, he borrowed the same plot to dispose of the threatening "sur-
rogate," its commonplace concerns and its petrified language. Yasha,
the Germanophile Russian student, Rudolph the man-about-town and
the contemporary feminine cliche, Olga, recreate a modernistically
decadent version of the Lensky-Onegin-Olga triangle, with its culmi-
nation in the callow automatism of the duel on the one hand and the
"fatality" of the suicide-pact on the other. In both cases it is as if the
fashionable automatism of their elegiac poetry has spawned a violent
nemesis that is equally typical of the "spirit of the times." The sad
killing of the "double" is, however, a moment of liberation for the
poet-narrator who has arranged it: in Eugene Onegin Lensky-the-ele-
gist's death unleashes a cascade of elegies in different styles, the nar-
rator's masterfully inventive and ironic elegy to the elegy. Fyodor tells
the "all-too-true story" of Yasha in his mind precisely in order to kill
any resemblance in himself to the clinical "mourning and melan-
cholia" that passed for elegiac art in the emigration.42 Fyodor's first
book of elegiac poems stands in implicit contrast both to the common
experience and to the "human documents" of the emigration.
Fyodor has written a poetic cycle consisting of fifty poems, mo-
ments of childhood frozen in time, with an upbeat message inscribed
into their circular structure: the ball lost under the seemingly impreg-
nable piece of furniture (that hostile inertia of phenomenological real-
ity) can be found: "everything, everything" which gave rise to the poem
can be recovered through its mediation. If The Gift is viewed by critics
as an allegory of Russian Literature with a capital R and L, then
Fyodor's poetry has been improbably supposed to represent "the
Golden Age of Russian lyric poetry."43 The critics' connection of
Fyodor's debut with Pushkin does not, nevertheless, come un-
prompted. In chapter 3 Nabokov gives a masterful parody of Fyodor's
unsuccessful apprenticeship in modernist poetry, whose ultimate tend-
ency will be to discredit all his poetic (sibling) rivals, in the name of
his father.

42. In "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), Freud discusses the melancholic's

inability to complete the "work of mourning" through cathectic reattachment to a
substitutive object, a result of which might be the narcissistic rebounding on the
melancholic's self of those unresolved feelings (Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, trans.
Joan Riviere [New York: Basic Books, 1959], IV: 152-70).
43. Davydov (417) sets up the paradigm "Each of Fedor's artistic accomplishments
is weighed on Pushkin's scales" but then finesses the point: "Fedor's development as
an artist loosely parallels the path Russian literature took after the Golden Age of
poetry in the 1820's." Joseph Brodsky mocks the claim: "Some, like Nabokov, for
example, have tried to the very end to convince themselves and those around them
that even if they were not primarily poets, they were poets all the same" ("A Poet and
Prose," in Less than One: Selected Essays [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986], 177).

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 152 Slavic Review

When today I tote up what has remained to me of this new poetry I

see that very little has survived, and what has is precisely a natural
continuation of Pushkin, while the motley husk, the wretched sham,
the masks of mediocrity and the stilts of talent-everything that my
love once forgave or saw in a special light (and that seemed to my
father to be the true face of innovation-'the mug of modernism' as
he expressed it), is now so old-fashioned, so forgotten as even Kar-
amzin's verses are not forgotten; and when on someone else's shelf I
come across this or that collection of poems which had once lived with
me as brother, I feel in them only what my father then felt without
actually knowing them [my emphasis].44

Actually, framing the bright little cubes of the poems in the much
richer and more ambivalent memories of Fyodor's rereading mind
places the poems at a disadvantage. Even as he reads, Fyodor begins
to question whether such symmetrical little structures, now compared
to a room white-shuttered against the "helpless darkness" of the gar-
den, now to a verbal fence designed to keep the "dangerous reader"
out,45 have not kept out every other challenge to their brittle order.
His father, for example, is much too large to be contained by them.
More important than the poems themselves is the counterpoint Na-
bokov sets up between the poems and the surrounding prose.
In his late story "Egyptian Nights" Pushkin used a similar embed-
ded structure of poem within prose-tale to dramatize poetry's trans-
formational power over the flat prose-frame of reality. Nabokov
achieves the opposite effect: embedded in the sinuous prose of
Fyodor's rereading memory, the poems reveal their limitations. An
eloquent instance is the paired poems about the periodic winding of
the grandfather clock, followed euphemistically by next morning's jolly
wake-up call. What is excised by the poems is restored by the prose of
Fyodor's memory: the intervening demon-ridden night, the "endless
measure of my insomnias," the psychic cavern for whose torments a
language does not yet exist, where only his father-and Pushkin-have
preceded him. It is the prose, not the poems, which presses against the
borders of verbally conquered experience, in which Fyodor screams in
an unintelligible Mongolian voice to his human captors. And it is in
the prose that we recognize the unmistakable trace of Pushkin's most
innovative lyrics: "Stikhi, sochinennye noch'iu vo vremia bessonnitsy"
(Verses composed at night during insomnia), with its ticking clock and
scrabbling mouse-like anxiety, and "Prorok" (The Prophet), with its
underwater monsters and ritually torn-out tongue. The white book of

44. The Gift, 139. In fact, nostalgic vignettes of childhood appear in Russian poetry
only with the modernists, and derive from the prose-memoir and pseudo-memoir, not
from the pushkinian elegy. Marina Tsvetaeva's child's eye lyrics in her early collections
Vechernii al'bom (1910) and Volshebnyifonar' (1912) are a more original, somewhat less
coy example of the genre. On the prose memoirs of the modernists, see Andrew
Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1990).
45. Ibid., 18.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 153

poems is outgrown and left behind, but its failure points toward an
expansion of elegiac language.
Fyodor will continue throughout the book to compose poignant
elegiac verses on Russia and loss in readily recognizable classical me-
ters; but it is the richly meandering, associative path of his prose sen-
tences that allows him to slip through the cracks of his hated Berlin
reality to the "hothouse paradise of the past." At the end of each
nostalgic foray he is rewarded or frustrated by a glimpse of his father,
just turning away, always departing, "with a smile hidden in the corner
of his beard." As scrupulously as Fyodor and his mother try to separate
their own sentiments from the truth of their recollections, the mem-
ories they carefully assemble have an identical underlying structure:
they mimic separation and death, but always at the last minute grant
a reprieve.46 Thus in one anecdote, his mother recalls how her husband
disappeared on their honeymoon in pursuit of a butterfly. "Suddenly
I saw him walking across the lawn ... waving to me as if nothing had
happened ... his jacket torn on one side." In another a harsh separa-
tion is mitigated by the explorer galloping back on his white horse
and "parting quite differently this time." The memories choreograph
the father as always returning, transparently reflecting the family's de-
sire to recapture him, like an exotic butterfly, in the nets of domestic
sentiment. "Yes I know this is not the way to write-these exclamations
won't take me very deep-but my pen is not yet accustomed to follow-
ing the outlines of his image, and I myself abominate these unnecessary
curlicues." Yet it is precisely that backward-turned longing for resto-
ration that keeps Fyodor infinitely separated from his father. In this
state he is closer to the madly mourning Chernyshevsky-"a kind of
mocking variation on the theme of his own hope-suffused grief"47-
than to his adventurous, perpetually departing father.
What allows Fyodor egress from this dreamscape of eternal return?
As always in The Gift, all roads lead through Pushkin. Fyodor opens
"Journey to Arzrum" and hears in it "the one voice in a thousand that
he is looking for." But what exactly does Pushkin give him? A model
for exact, impersonal prose? An example of montage? Pushkin com-
posed "Journey to Arzrum" in 1835 from the notes of a trip he had
made in 1829 in order to escape the stifling reality of Petersburg and
to revisit the old haunts of his still earlier exile, which now had an odd
poetic attraction for him. (Note that the interval between the time of
writing [1835 and about 1935] and the past that each wants to recapture
[1820-1823 and 1922] is identical). Pushkin's trajectory took him away
from home geographically-in fact, he planned to meet the Russian
army on the Turkish front and accompany it to its exotic destination,
Arzrum-but imaginatively it was a journey back into his past. Or at
least he wanted it to be. In 'Journey to Arzrum" the past contin

46. John Burt Foster has pointed out to me that "the second half of chapter 9 in
Speak, Memory is built even more emphatically on the same logic."
47. Ibid., 104, 89.

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 154 Slavic Review

eludes him; he sees the locales of his Romantic poems, cites a few lines
here and there, but the poetry of the past is dead, and cannot be
resuscitated. "Journey to Arzrum" is the story of a failed poetic jour-
ney. Pushkin travels at top speed, trying to propel himself beyond the
Russian border, beyond the border of the claustrophobically familiar,
but finds that border nightmarishly eluding him. In a particularly evoc-
ative moment, he fords the river Arpachai in order to set foot, for the
first time in his life, on foreign soil, only to discover that the other
bank has just been conquered: "I still found myself in unencompass-
able Russia."48
Yet his failure elegiacally to retrace his own poetic steps has given
birth to a completely new kind of prose, in appearance realistic yet,
in its metaphorical structure and its reason for being, essentially lyri-
cal. "The border held something mysterious for me," the phrase that
catches Fyodor's attention, refers not only to a spatial but also to a
literary border-crossing. Fyodor's intuition that he need go no further
than "Journey to Arzrum" in his search for a language commensurate
with his father and the pain of his loss is symbolically ratified by his
daydream of the palimpsestic fusion of his father's and Pushkin's hands,
and by the memory of his father's voice turning Pushkin's line-"Tut
Apollon-ideal, tam Niobeia-pechal'" (Here is Apollo the ideal, there
Niobe-sorrow)-into a lepidopterist's punning talisman.49
The hunt for butterflies, at first located in the childhood paradise
of the past, becomes an archaic quest through which the boy can follow
his father's steps out of childhood into manhood. At first the desire
for literal restoration, abandoned at the level of narrative, reappears
in their common study of butterflies, their migrations and mysteriously
uninterruptible life-cycles.50 Yet butterflies also remind Fyodor of the
elusiveness of his prey: four butterfly wings can be collected from the
forest floor, but the body itself has disappeared.

Why then do I feel so sad? His captures, his observations, the sound
of his voice in scientific works: all this, I think, I will preserve. But
that is still so little. With the same relative permanence I would like
to retain what it was, perhaps, that I loved most about him: his live
masculinity, inflexibility, and independence, the chill and warmth of
his personality, his power over everything that he undertook ... his

48. See my "Pushkin's 'Journey to Arzrum': The Poet at the Border," Slavic Review
50, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 940-53; and Davydov's illuminating comments on Pushkin
and Nabokov's alliterative prose (419).
49. "Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin's voice merged the voice of his
father. He kissed Pushkin's hot little hand, taking it for another, large hand smelling
of the breakfast kalach." Nabokov explains the paronomastic allusion to butterflies on
the same page (94). The lines are from Pushkin's 1836 lyric "Khudozhniku" ("Grusten
i vesel vkhozhu, vaiatel', v tvoiu masterskuiu .. ."), which is simultaneously a celebra-
tion of the artist's invention and craft, and an elegy to Del'vig, Pushkin's boyhood
friend and classicist-interlocutor.
50. Alexandrov discusses Fedor's "epiphanic apprehension of the complex life
of butterflies" on 118, 127, 136.

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 155

secret solitude ... having no connexion with human emotions, tor-

menting my soul with his inscrutable solitariness.51

Entomology modulates Fyodor's expectations from the naively "pas-

chal" longing for literal restoration of soul and body52 to a faith in the
collection and preservation of dead external forms, finally to an ac-
ceptance of the paradox of metamorphosis: change beyond recogni-
tion.
Let me interject here that Nabokov had already begun the process
of fictional metamorphosis in his rewriting of his father's vocation; for
although V.D. Nabokov was an amateur collector, it is the son's pas-
sionate vocation that was projected backward onto him, creating a
narrative space for father-son apprenticeship, initiation, bequest. For
example, the technique of genital armature that Fyodor's father teaches
his son for the identification of sub-species was actually mastered by
Nabokov later in his pioneering research on the butterflies of the
American west.53 For Nabokov, I suspect, a great deal of his father's
"strangeness" lay in his antithetical professional pursuits, his labor and
self-sacrifice for a cause that was utterly foreign to his son. The lawyer-
statesman's metamorphosis into an exotic naturalist created a shared
"nature" with his son, while conveying his essential strangeness to the
world. Entomology serves as a convenient middle term, an apprentice-
ship, between the father's and son's vocations: between the inflexible
devotion to the truth-law-science of one, and the passion for fiction of
the other. The opposition between truth and lies, law and poetry, is
mediated by the truth-stranger-than-fiction of butterflies.54
In The Gift Fyodor eventually also abandons his attempt to record
what he knows of his father's life and instead projects his sense of his
father's strangeness onto the exotic landscape of his unknown jour-
neys, his Pushkinian pursuit of a "mysterious border." The subjects of
the journey, initially "he and I," gradually shift into the collective form
used by Pushkin in "Journey to Arzrum": "our caravan" and then fi-
nally to "I." Each father has supplanted, even canceled the other. Push-
kin's lyrical prose journey in space liberates Fyodor from the language
of elegiac recapture; while his father's scientific knowledge authorizes
the rewriting of "Journey to Arzrum" "not by an ignorant poet this
time, but by a naturalist of genius."
Yet the deeper Fyodor travels into the landscape and into his own,
newly elevated "Chinese perspective," the clearer it becomes that this

51. The Gift, 107, 109, 115.

52. Alexandrov elucidates the eucharistic imagery that accompanies an entomo-
logical expedition headed by Kh. V. Baranovskii in one of Fedor's reminiscences about
his father (136).
53. Boyd, 24.
54. Foster makes a comparable point: "As a student of butterflies and other in-
sects, he was fascinated by mimicry, camouflage, and metamorphosis; and in his art
of memory he emulates this view of nature by deliberately straddling the line between
seemingly clear-cut categories" (36).

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 156 Slavic Review

is no naturalist's treatise, but a Lewis Carroll-like remapping of real-

ity:55

In my vicinity some witch doctors with the weary and crafty look of
competitors were collecting for their mercenary needs Chinese rhu-
barb, whose root bears an extraordinary resemblance to a caterpillar,
right down to its prolegs and spiracles-while I, in the meantime,
found under a stone the caterpillar of an unknown moth, which rep-
resented not in a general way but with absolute concreteness a copy
of that root, so that it was not quite clear which was impersonating
which-or why.56

Among men become "shadows of men, endlessly changing their out-

lines" and the fantastically precise and improbable species, Fyodor
finds-or creates-what he was looking for, a talismanic image of his
father's deathlessness: his "large, brightly-illumined, skillful hand, with
almond-shaped fingernails, unhurriedly raking moths into the killing
jar."57 It is in this description that the disturbingly handless father on
the other side of the slitted door in Berlin is transformed: a god rather
than a victim of death, coolly and aristocratically ushering other crea-
tures across a border from which he is exempt.
Why does Fyodor cancel his book after "collecting" all the mate-
rials, bringing together "swarms of drafts"? Because his elusive subject
has again escaped? Or because he wants his father to escape closure,
to remain outside "the killing jar of his art," uncollected, incompletely
remembered, not transfixed on the pin of a finished image but instead
part of its creative matrix? By means of yet another unwritten manu-
script, he has purged himself of the need for "return" and "recapture."
He recognizes that what he has been pursuing in his father, that elusive
"solitariness," perhaps a scene of explicit bequest, he already has inside
him; and that he will realize it not by retracing his father's footsteps
but by making completely different journeys in language-as strange
as his father's-but on his own.
Merciless enclosure in a demystifying text (indeed, in the two halves
of a sonnet) is the fate reserved for the father of the illegitimate line
of Russian literature with a social conscience, Nikolai Chernyshevsky.58

55. Other details, such as the herd of moose frozen alive together with their
streaming tears, are reminiscent of Carroll's famous images. Nabokov was working on
his translation of Lewis Carroll, Ania v strane chudes, in summer 1922.
56. The Gift, 116-17.
57. The Gift, 113.
58. I have given chapter 4 short shrift because it has been very well served by
other critics. See Paperno, as well as Sergei Davydov's "The Gift: Nabokov's Aesthetic
Exorcism of Chernyshevskii," Canadian-American Slavic Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 357-
74, for fine and detailed demonstrations of Nabokov's work with the documentary
literature. David Rampton displays a less parti pris attitude when, instead of joining
the ridicule, he demonstrates to what extent Nabokov misquotes, conflates quotations
or quotes out of context in order to caricature Chernyshevskii's opinions (Vladimir
Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984],
64-100).

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 Pushkin's Trace in The Gift 157

Returning to his recurrent theme of the bullet, Fyodor calls it "target

practice." Faithful to the details of the life of the "body," Fyodor's
book destroys the spurious "wings" that have been mistakenly attached
to it. The Life of Chernyshevsky is an anti-elegiac act; it erases its own
subject as one worthy of art or even remembrance. The most telling
inversion of Fyodor's father's unwritten life is the either/or denoue-
ment of Chernyshevsky's, with its optional death: either Chernyshevsky
was executed or his sentence was commuted to decades of exile in
Siberia. In Fyodor's presentation, the border between the two vanishes.
Chernyshevsky spends his decades of reprieved life in an unknown
land translating a German history of the world, as he has all his knowl-
edge, from one piece of paper to another. In Chernyshevsky's case, the
life sentence is an unbearably drawn-out epilogue, tacked onto the
epigraph, "Death is inevitable," with which the Life begins; whereas in
Godunov-Cherdyntsev's case, the life is so inexhaustibly rich in event
and nuance that narrative can never overtake it. As in Xeno's paradox,
there is always half again as much of the life to recount before you get
to the end; and the only way to capture the strangeness of its truth is
by lying.
The last stage of Fyodor's journey toward his father/his own voca-
tion is, to borrow Harold Bloom's phrase, the internalization of his
quest.59 It is as if his father's exotic distance no longer lies between
them, but has instead established itself in his inner eye, positioning it
at exactly the proper distance to destroy the "resolution" of what is
commonly taken for reality. From this internal, "Chinese perspective,"
liberated from the narrow plot of "human interest," life reveals itself
as a comic paradise. Again, Fyodor discovers that "he need not have
gone so far": in chapter 5 he is in a position to receive the gift which
has been with him from the beginning, the self-transforming form of
Eugene Onegin. The famously poignant sentence, "A schast'e bylo tak
vozmozhno, tak blizko! . ." (And yet happiness was so possible, so close!)
with which Tatiana summarizes the fatal lack of synchronism of her
and Eugene's passion for each other, hovers like an unarticulated comic
leitmotiv over Fyodor and Zina's snail's pace crawl toward consum-
mation. Materializing now as a paper-thin wall between his bed and
her body, now as a wrong or missing key, the deathless poetic phrase
is echoed by "reality." The happy couple merely mime in the large and
legible script of romantic comedy the real subject of chapter 5, the
celebration of mastery.
Like a caterpillar, Fyodor's creative impulse has woven and then
burst from a series of textual metamorphoses, externally disparate and
yet, as I have tried to show, biologically related. His repeated failure
elegiacally to recapture his father in a Pushkinian form is, thanks to
the romantic ironic structure of The Gift, Nabokov's gain. What Fyodor

59. Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance," in Harold Bloom,

ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1979), 3-23.

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 158 Slavic Review

is forced to give up as too large, personal or complex to fit into any

work of art he is capable of composing is, of course, elegized in The
Gift precisely in the guise of rejected "autobiographical raw material."
Like Eugene Onegin,60 The Gift rejects nothing, not the omitted stanzas
or drafts that were part of its gestation, nor the outgrown mourning
process, nor the author's artistic false starts. It includes the pseudo-
Pushkinian lyrics even as it proves that to be reverently faithful to
inherited form is to betray the spirit of Pushkinian metamorphosis.
The Gift is the biography, and the accumulation, of its own meta-
morphoses, so capacious that in the scene of the bacchanal at the
Writer's Union, names of characters from different works and centu-
ries of Russian literature (Fyodor, Luzhin, Charsky) mingle with their
suddenly diminutive and distorted authors, Shirin, Vladimirov and the
"repulsively small, almost portable lawyer Poshkin" in whose unlikely
figure the two fathers of The Gift, the lyrical poet and the elided lawyer,
are elliptically and festively fused. It is perhaps no accident that Na-
bokov's Writer's Union bacchanal and Tatiana's equally wild and
metapoetic name-day party celebrate, in their respective fifth chapters,
their authors' poetic coming-of-age.
"Itak, ia zhil togda v Odesse. . ." (So, I was living in Odessa then...
Like Eugene Onegin, The Gift trails off to its own fragmentary but tre-
mendously satisfying close, leaving its lovers in a quandary, its par-
odistic Onegin stanza dangling, yet its mission completed. Not only
did Nabokov succeed, around the edges of Fyodor's failure, in crea-
tively mourning his father, Russia and his own abandonment of the
Russian poetic language; he even bestowed on the emigration-that
despised everyday reality from which Fyodor fastidiously dissociates
himself, which never makes it into his works-its most durable and
wryly tender elegy. The stage is littered with literary corpses: not only
with the imposter line of "authentic," truth-telling Russian novelists,
headed by Chernyshevsky, but also, I would suggest, with the corpse
of literary purity, mistakenly dubbed "Pushkinian." As readers recog-
nize the beloved meter and intonations surfacing through the modern
prose in which they have been planted, it is up to them to decide
whether Nabokov's artistic departure is in some ways a homecoming,
a continuation of the Pushkinian essence of Russian poetry-or an act
of samozvanstvo.

60. Davydov (1992, 418) makes this point in general terms: "Nabokov also seems
to continue Pushkin's experiments with the hybrid genre. Entire sections of the novel
are written in verse form, overt and concealed, which makes Dar a generic cousin of
Pushkin's 'novel in verse.'"

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