Citations from book by VLADIMIR NABOKOV, "THINK, WRITE, SPEAK"

MORE WORDS OF WISDOM FROM VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Once again, the redoubtable Brian Boyd, who has dedicated himself for years now to commendable scholarship on Nabokov, is to be congratulated. His latest publication is Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy (NY: 2019). What follows below is not a book review, but a series of citations.

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“For good reason, Nabokov has often been considered the finest prose stylist in English. He knew that if he worked at what he wrote he could make it sing, sometimes with the complex amplitude of choral polyphony.” (Introduction, xxxii)

“I write what I like and some like what I write.” (Nab. quoted, xxxvi)

We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

The future is not Wholly Dry.

Mud unto mud! – Death eddies near –

Not here the appointed End, not here!

But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

Is wetter water, slimier slime!

Citation from the Rupert Brooke poem “Heaven,” written from a fishy viewpoint, in an early book review by Nabokov on Brooke (8-9)

“History as an exact science is just for convenience, ‘for the simple folk,’ as the museum guard used to say, showing two skulls of one and the same criminal, in youth and old age.” (56)

“As for the whiff of revolution, it, too, having appeared by chance, will disappear by chance, as has already happened a thousand times in human history. In Russia simpleminded communism will be replaced by something more intelligent . . .” (58)

This opinion is from an essay written in 1926. Nabokov did not live to see the demise of communism in Russia, but, as he might have guessed from contemplating a thousand years of Russian history, his hapless homeland remains luckless when it comes to political systems. They got rid of the Soviets, they brought God back, but the new system turned out to be far from intelligent.

“…how eagerly and how adroitly the very slightest thing strives to slip away from man, and how inclined it is to suicide. A dropped coin, with the haste of a desperate fugitive, traces a wide arc on the floor and disappears into the farthest corner under the farthest sofa.” (69) From an essay titled “Man and Things,” 1928.

On the other hand, some things are more likely to vanish not at the hands of suicide, but of homicide. Take a donut, for example.

In Russian hotels during pre-Soviet times people would leave their footwear outside their rooms at night to be cleaned. The man in the next room, say, leaves his boots by the door. What do I care about the downtrodden, dirty clompers, as they sit there forlornly in the corridor? Not a jot. “But were my neighbor to die tonight, [be found dead in his bed in Room 606], what human warmth, what pity, what live and tender beauty would these shabby old boots—with their eyelet flaps sticking out like little ears—radiate over me.” (70) From “Man and Things.”

A small child (Nabokov) has an uncle who has died of diphtheria. They disinfect his rooms, and the child understands the disinfection as a means of separating the essence of the uncle from the things that had belonged to him, “removing from the things the dust, the smell, [all of that avuncular something] that had made these things precisely his.” (Ibid)

“A pencil is, by its very nature, softer, kinder than a pen. The pen speaks, the pencil whispers.” (72)

Идиосинкразия (idiosinkrazija) vs. Idiosyncrasy

In some of his books Nabokov likes to emphasize how paronomasia and wordplay can be overdone, to the point where the character, or even author, finds himself skipping about in a madhouse of dancing sounds and consonants. This is especially noticeable in Bend Sinister and in the index to his Gogol book.

In November, 1937, prior to the publication of his first novel published in the U.S.—Laughter in the Dark, in English—Nabokov filled out a publicity questionnaire for the publisher, Bobbs-Merrill.

In answer to one question he was thrown by the different meanings of what looks like the same word in two different languages. Here is the definition of idiosinkrazija in Russian: “an acute morbid sensitivity of the organism to certain substances or influences.” You can say, in Russian, “I have an idiosinkrazija to (morbid sensitivity to) the squeak of cotton wool.” In other words, cotton wool squeaking makes my skin crawl.

The most common meaning of the word idiosyncrasy in English is “a physiological or temperamental peculiarity.” When the questionnaire reads, “Idiosyncrasies, if any,” it is requesting a listing of odd or eccentric habits or characteristics, quirks. Nabokov might have mentioned, e.g., his synesthesia, or the way he cannot get started in the morning without the squeezed juice from two oranges. But reading the word in its Russian meaning, he answers, “The squeak of cotton wool, the touch of satin.” (133)

Coincidence

“Once, in London, I dreamt of a green wall and the very next day I was introduced to a person whose name turned out to be Greenwall. I never met him again, nor did that meeting in any way affect the course of my existence, but several years later I picked up a book from a stall and its title was Dreams and Their Meaning, by A. Greenwall.” (134)

“All writers that are worth anything are humorists. I’m not P.G. Wodehouse. I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. The best tragedian is O’Neill. He is probably the worst writer. Dostoevsky’s slapstick is wonderful, but in his tragedy he is a journalist.” (310)

“Some of my readers have read my books better than I have written them.” (314)

“The highest virtue of a writer, of any artist, is to stimulate in others an inward thrill.” (256)

In 1959, back in Paris for the first time since 1940, Nabokov doesn’t like the way it smells. “It doesn’t smell like before. What has become of the smell of dead leaves? I imagine they treat the trees with pesticide and that kills the autumn odor, or God knows what.” (273)

Reminds me of Kiev in the fall of 1986, right after Chernobyl. You wonder about the irradiated leaves that fell from the horse chestnut trees downtown. Did they smell any different?

Three Kinds of Readers

“You have lowbrow readers, for whom only the sentimental side of a book counts; middlebrows, fond of ideas, and finally the highbrows, responsive to art.” (274)

A beautiful name, Dolores, “A name with a long veil, a name with liquid eyes.” (283)

“My pleasures are the most intense known to man: butterfly hunting and writing.” (319)

“One could define a pun as two words caught in flagrante.” (370)

“I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside . . . . one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word—unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word.” (469)

“the good reader [when presented with “serious wordplay”] suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.” (Ibid)

                                                  Natan Altman, "Landscape in Blue"

Notes on "Crime and Punishment" COINCIDENCE AND FYODOR DOSTOEVSY AS UTILITARIAN GOD OF THE NARRATIVE

Coincidence

With his strong Christian sentiments Dostoevsky believed thoroughly in human free will and taking responsibility for one’s deeds. So how do we square that with the overriding importance of coincidence in Part One of C and P? In carrying out his plan to commit murder, Raskolnikov does everything wrong, sets himself up to fail or be caught all along the line—and, miraculously succeeds. In fact, he has committed the perfect crime, and there is little or no chance that he will ever be charged. Then he proceeds to do lots of things to guarantee that he’ll be caught.

If you consider all the coincidences that operate in Raskolnikov’s favor in Part One, it is hard to remain unconvinced that some sort of supernatural power is (1) guiding him along like a blind man toward the crime, and (2) helping him escape afterwards. Sonya would say that this is the devil at work, but there are hints in the novel that it may be the Lord God.

Let’s trace all the most significant situations in which chance operates in Part One (p. 46-74 of the Norton Critical Edition C and P). We begin with the famous mare dream and Raskolnikov’s reaction to having had a dream in which he himself plays the role of a little boy watching peasants beat a horse to death. “I won’t do it, I won’t do it! [kill the old lady as he has planned] Lord, show me the way, that I may renounce this accursed fantasy of mine!” Next, he makes for home, but instead of going home by his usual route, he is led to cross Haymarket Square.

“Why, he used to ask himself later, did such an important and fateful encounter take place in the Haymarket (through which he had no reason to go) just at this time, just when his mood and circumstances were exactly those in which the meeting could have so fateful and decisive an influence on his destiny? It was almost as if fate had laid an ambush for him (52; my italics). 

What this refers to is the way he overhears the pawnbroker’s sister Lizaveta’s conversation in the Haymarket. From this conversation he learns that Lizaveta will not be at home the next day at 7:00 p.m., and “the old woman would be at home alone” (53).

“In later years he was always inclined to see something strange and mysterious in all the happenings of that time, as if special coincidences and influences were at work” (54).

Next coincidence: he stops off at a miserable little tavern and overhears his own theory of murder propagated by a student who uses as an example precisely the same old woman whom Raskolnikov has been planning to kill. In mouthing the same utilitarian principles that motivate Raskolnikov’s behavior—“you could murder the old lady, steal from her, and use the money to do good and benefit humanity”—the student demonstrates how unoriginal Raskolnikov’s ideas are; those notions are so much blowing in the wind of the day that two people speaking casually in a bar can give voice to them.

At this point, Dostoevsky, who goes out of his way to help the reader see the main idea, adds another amazed afterthought on the part of the hero: “This always seemed to him a strange coincidence. This casual public-house conversation had an extraordinary influence on the subsequent development of the matter, as if there were indeed something fateful and foreordained about it” (57; my italics).

From this point on everything that Raskolnikov does is flawed, but Fate (or the devil, or God) so helps things along that everything works out fine. While dreaming a dream about an Egyptian oasis, he nearly sleeps through the interval when he plans to commit the crime, but then a clock strikes just in time and wakes him up (58). Now he is in a total daze, sick and feverish, and his reactions are “almost completely mechanical, as though someone had taken his hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with supernatural strength” (60; my italics)

The servant girl Nastasya ends up being in the kitchen, so that he cannot pick up the axe he needs, but almost miraculously he comes upon an axe in the porter’s room: “It was not my planning, but the devil that accomplished that! he thought” (62).

Just as Raskolnikov turns into the gateway at the old pawnbroker’s building, “as if by design” a load of hay turns as well and screens him. Nobody sees him enter the courtyard. After he commits the murder he loses his head and does everything absolutely wrong. He even leaves the door open behind him, noticing this only after he has committed his second murder, of Lizaveta, who walks in at the wrong time.

A man arrives and knocks at the door, now locked. Soon another arrives. Raskolnikov has no way to get past these men and escape down the staircase, but, luckily, the man who is to remain at the door while the other goes for help decides to leave as well. As Raskolnikov descends the stairs he hears both of them returning. He has nowhere to hide; they are bound to see him, remember him. But, again luckily, two painters have temporarily left the apartment where they are working, and Raskolnikov ducks in there and conceals himself.

He escapes. Nobody sees him anywhere. He puts the axe back in its place. No one sees him; no problem. The perfect crime. If he is caught now, Raskolnikov has only himself to blame. So then he spends the rest of the novel getting himself caught, because, wallowing in contrition, he wants to get caught. Or at least one side of his split personality wants to be caught.

So was it really the devil helping him out continuously and guiding him inevitably toward the crime? And protecting him after the crime? Was it predestination? But Dostoevsky does not believe in predestination. For the rest of the novel Sonya’s God, or Jesus Christ seems to be guiding Raskolnikov though expiation of he crime and toward redemption.

Much is made of the spiritual benefits of suffering, not only in C and P, but also in much that Dostoevsky has written. There are implications that Raskolnikov may have a great future ahead of him, and that perhaps he has to suffer his way through to spiritual enlightenment before that future can be realized. The rather strange police inspector, Porfiry Petrovich, who sometimes acts almost as much as a father confessor to Raskolnikov as an investigator trying to solve a crime, suggests as much late in the novel.

Before the journey of suffering can begin, before the sufferer can work his way through to salvation, he must commit a horrible act. Following this logic—which is certainly hinted at in the narrative—the murder must be committed. So is it the Lord God setting up all the coincidences that lead Raskolnikov through the murder and escape? If so, the Lord God certainly works in mysterious ways. In fact, you could almost see the Lord as a kind of believer in the principles of Utilitarianism here. “Let’s kill off one old woman for the greater usefulness and good of our hero.”

A different and better way of looking at this issue is to assume that the god of the fiction here, Fyodor Dostoevsky himself, sets things up so as to make his narrative move along the way he wishes. Raskolnikov must commit the crime and must get away with it. If not, where would the book go as a whole, and how could the rest of it be written?