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a distant star, bears his name) are only a symptom of his eternal nostalgia,
the sole proof his paradise existed. His lepidopterian myth, which he cul–
tivated consciously and stubbornly, is merely a response and a challenge
to a "bestial century" (as Mandelstam called it), a sign and message:
while the world howls with the wolves, the master-demiurge leaves his
ivory tower, a tower of ideas closely resembling the chess piece, and
chases butterflies, those flying flowers which are the presence of art in a
world without God, and infinitesimal (material) proof or scholastic ar–
gument for the existence of paradise, for the
possibility
of its existence.
Hell as antithesis, the radical evil of our century - Nabokov had no
desire to consider it or approach the flames more closely than is permit–
ted to mortal man. For there reign chaos, sound and fury; its landscapes
are gray and cruel like the Kolyma of the unfortunate Varlam Shalamov.
Where civilization and culture have ceased to exist, where man's spiritual
and moral qualities have been destroyed, there is no place for Nabokov's
characters or for parody, games or memory. Nabokov's world is too
domesticated, too humanized, too policed. The "aesthetic shudder," the
tingling that creeps up the spinal column, "the highest form of emotion,
which humanity achieved when it discovered pure art" (V.N.) has long
become anguish and trembling, the fear of death. It is their timelessness
that makes Nabokov's novels seem as anachronistic as their nineteenth–
century counterparts. Their themes and techniques make them slightly
frivolous fairy tales. A magnificent, complex, and sterile art, to paraphrase
Nabokov's characterization of the art of composing chess problems.
Nabokov wished to oppose the world of barbarism and chaos to a
world of order and form, to give back art its role of demiurge, to re–
habilitate the classical model of master and mastery. Like the
poetes mau–
dits,
he created an artificial paradise in which there is no opium but po–
etry, and he peopled this paradise with hominids - all his characters are
to some extent somnambulists or dream characters moving in a world of
illusion, beyond good and evil, and the terrible tumult of history barely
reaches them. These creatures of dream and memory, these fallen angels,
are devoid of blood, or else their blood is blue and violet like ink; they
are the fruits of immaculate conception and subject to an eternal long–
ing, a medieval erotic dream; children are brought into this world with–
out pain and people die easily - in the last chapter with a stroke of the
pen - like pieces toppled on the chessboard returning to their nonexis–
tence.
And yet Nabokov's condemnation of a certain variety of literature
and of certain writers is more moralistic than aesthetic. All his work - his
stories and novels, his essays, lectures, and interviews - his whole stance, is
