380
PARTISAN REVIEW
of art. And when one cannot dream, one had best keep silent.
Convinced in his way of the potency, the omnipotence, of art (and
culture), he turned into a scoffing parodist when depicting the reactions
of the political animal: tyrants, like vices, he felt, can be exterminated by
mockery. He also believed - and he may have been right - that the
world of barbarism can be combated only by the world of art, that even
if art does not act directly on people and events it can, like music, slowly
but surely temper human nature.
This conception of art may well have come from his "rich nostalgia"
- the world surrounding him in Russia was a world of kindness, beauty,
and love (which are perhaps the same thing), a world of culture, in
which art, poetry, and music made deep inroads on the human heart.
The fact is that Nabokov saw only the sunny side of Russia, nests of no–
blemen, blonde princesses, urbane and cultivated individuals, whereas the
seamy side, the crude and cruel world of
muzjiks
and misery, passed him
by as though seen through the windows of a Pullman. That is why, little
by little, his "timeless Russia" became a mythical country, the Zembla, a
fairytale country without geographical identification, Vinland, Courland,
Zoorland, a Terra Nabokoviana, where people speak "a Nordic
tongue," an imaginary childhood language .
Nabokov's art derives its emotional charge from the first twenty
years of his life, those passed in Russia; they are the source of his arsenal
of images, his wealth of imagery, the wellspring of his inspiration. The
Russia of his childhood is his lost paradise, his
Paradise Lost,
its images and
archetypes
(pardon, maitre!)
feeding his writing to the end of his days,
with exile merely stimulating his nostalgia. Like Alice/Anya he passed
through a magic looking-glass and found himself in Wonderland, a fairy–
tale country that seems as familiar to him as one of Pnin's linguistic mis–
understandings, for it was indeed a
Vater/and
and bore a close resem–
blance to Russia at the turn of the century. This enchanted realm has
castles surrounded by parks, where butterflies flutter and true princesses
stroll as in the novels of Tolstoy. One of the princesses is so much like a
certain Mashenka/Lolita that one might be led to believe that when
princesses pass through the looking-glass, they are punished by emerging
as coquettes and debauchees.
Nabokov experienced the loss of the paradise of his childhood in a
scholastic sense as the fall of the angel. And in this fall the work of di–
vine machination, the role of history, is negligible.
The whole of Nabokov's work is nothing if not a segmented
Proustian
recherche du paradis perdu,
and his butterflies, the ones in his
books and the ones he chased throughout the world (one of which, like
