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DANILO KIS
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history, which now at last would be guided by human will (and not by
irrational forces of necessity), that the Hegelian
Weltgeist
was irresistible
for the time being, and that a writer's best bet was to ignore the som–
nambulist attraction of the Great Illusion and "cultivate his garden."
Thus he found himself isolated from all - he who by the logic of his
origins should have been able to devote his pen and his mind to a
"higher cause," to write about past glory, the exploits of the vanquished,
about rivers of blood and grandiose crimes. He would have been hated
and glorified, he would have been a messiah and a victim, a living scan–
dal , Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn, Panait Istrati and Victor Serge
rolled into one. But Sirin-Nabokov wrote about the Bolsheviks (who
appear quite incidentally in these stories) without hate, with the same
detachment as he wrote about people with whom he (may have) sympa–
thized; he wrote as though observing the world from the sidelines,
askance, directing the lens of his camera at the drooping stockings of a
former prima donna, at the bald pink skull of a famous general, at the
trembling fingers of an alcoholic poet; he magnified the hairs in the nos–
trils or the rotten teeth in the mouth of a countess nibbling a sandwich
(a
buterbrodik)
on a local train.
Surely either in the Berlin of the twenties or in the Paris of the thir–
ties and forties, Nabokov could have met sufficient witnesses and col–
lected sufficient direct, oral or written testimonies of Soviet reality
(earlier and more reliable than Koestler's, for example) and thus become
a key witness to an epoch. Being a witness does not preclude literary
mastery (see Babel, Pilnyak, etc. ). For Nabokov, however, history was
the illusion of an illusion. And if he overlooked the crucial fact of the
twentieth century - the camps - and rejected them as material unworthy
of his pen, it was not only because he did not wish to waste his life in
vain polemics but also because he placed his bet on an eternity rather
than on the moment. (Nineteenth-century Russian literature gave him
enough examples of glorious victories and glorious defeats.)
Nabokov's conception of the world and humanity is an idealistic
one: the world is mere appearance and art is a reflection of the Platonic
models, the image of a lost paradise. The artist is the double of the
demiurge, and his world is only remotely connected with the outward
aspects of life: "Imagination is only a form of memory." He therefore
rejects all art that is based on current events. "A work of art is of no in–
terest to society ... What protects a work of art from moths and rust is
not its social significance but solely its artistic value." Nabokov views the
political animal
(zoon politikon)
with contempt because it is devoid of
idealism: its world is empty and so simplified that it cannot be the object
