378
PARTISAN REVIEW
Nabokov, or Nostalgia
Until the scandalous
Lolita
and its scandalously wretched film version,
Nabokov was virtually unknown outside Russian emigre circles and a
narrow set of devotees.
In
that period of great upheavals, neither critics
nor readers expected much from this magnificent
taIant
(in Russian, ac–
cent on the second syllable), while mediocre writers, floodlit against the
literary sky, their political allegories blown up into short stories or
thinned out into novels, achieved enormous popularity.
At that time, Nabokov remained a solitary aristocrat (in the Baude–
larian sense of the word, an aristocrat of the spirit), remote not only
from world events but also from the traditional political struggles into
which so many emigres threw themselves body and soul, and which re–
warded them only with hangovers and the bitter taste of defeat.
In
both
Berlin and Paris he had seen countless talents burn themselves out in the
flames of political passion and nostalgia, in polemics, feuds, poverty, and
madness, escape into messianism, Pan-Slavism, Occidentalism, spiritist evo–
cations of the Russian past, Orthodoxy, nationalism, anti-Semitism, be–
trayal, espionage, palmistry and nirvana, or else, driven by homesickness
and, equating bolshevism with populism, return to Russia and spiritual
servitude, the firing squad, or suicide.
Sirin-Nabokov· understood the vanity of these passions in time; he
saw the absurdity of all the Russian emigre governments, clubs, parties,
and circles flirting with fascism, bolshevism, Trotskyism, and the NKVD
(which incidentally on the eve of the War had its privileged hunting
ground in the West, especially in France, where it bagged big tsarist
game no less than small Troskyist partridges). In the brilliant stories he
published in Russian emigre journals, he portrayed the members of this
unhappy emigre society, incapable of assimilating into the local popula–
tion or of even engaging in useful political activity (if only to open the
eyes of the stream of French tourists
to
the fact that they had been
shown Potemkin villages in the Soviet Union) or - in spite of their tal–
ent - in creative endeavors. Nabokov realized that there was no hope of
opposing the Star of Bethlehem rising in the East, promising to fulfill all
the hopes of unfortunate mankind and put an end
to
the blind power of
*
The pseudonym Nabokov adopted in 1921 for his Russian writings.
