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situations and sums. Put two things together-jokes, images-and you get a
triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!" Inspired
advice . Be brilliant or be eaten . For the menaced Russian emigre was
necessarily two , if not more , persons in postwar Europe, one mired in a
pension in Berlin , making do , and the other alive in a mythical Russia, a Nova
Zembla as liberal and broad as the imagination itself. What he is is surely
poorer and less human than what he was . The hero of
Mary
finally prefers the
remembered Mary to the historical Mary who at the end of the novel comes to
Berlin to meet him , a rush of vivid time he avoids by leaving Berlin before her
long-anticipated arrival. This divided, antithetical self is present in almost all
Nabokov 's novels, Russian and English. Look at the harlequin, Vadim tells his
second significant lover at one point , indicating the creature , and she
responds , flicking it away, "a most ordinary nettlefly
(krapivnitsa)."
But the
nettlefly's survival depends on that illusion-and in that instant the fate of
Vadim 's second marriage is decided.
So there it is, the brute world presses in on this stateless , uprooted
Russian sensibility . Space and time are indeed problems : where will he live,
where is home , and what is history but a succession of displacements, different
hotels in different decades? Reality is the enemy, a combination of commis–
sars , prosaic wives, and Gravity . "My battle with factual , respectable life still
consisted of sudden delusions, sudden reshufflings!-kaleidoscopic , stained–
glass reshufflings!-of fragmented space. I still felt Gravity , that infernal and
humiliating contribution to our perceptual world, grow into me like a
monstrous toenail in stabs and wedges of intolerable pain (incomprehensible
to the happy simpleton who finds nothing fantastic and agonizing in the
escape of a pencil or penny
under
something- under the desk on which one
will live , under the bed on which one will die)." The response is artistic , life
not here but there , the nettlefly's butterfly life, and yet Gravity pulls and the
task for Vadim is to bring his two tales together, the story of his stories and the
story of his life , books and wives, desks and beds, self and self. This is the
morality spoken in his recurrent nightmare. "In actual, physical life I can turn
as simply and swiftly as anyone . But mentally , with my eyes closed and my
body immobile, I am unable to switch from one direction to the other. Some
swivel cell in my brain does not work. I can cheat, of course , by setting aside
the mental snapshot of one vista and leisurely selecting the opposite view for
my walk back to my starting point. But if I do not cheat, some kind of
atrocious obstacle , which would drive me mad if I persevered, prevents me
from imagining the twist which transforms one direction into another,
directly opposite. I am crushed, I am carrying the whole world on my back in
the process of trying to visualize my turning around and making myself see in
terms of 'right' what! saw in terms of'left' and vice versa." We learn later the
ostensible solution to this conundrum . He has confused direction and
duration , mistaken time for space. "Why then is it so extraordinary that he
