Man From the USSR & Other Plays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  PLAYS

  Nabokov and the Theatre

  Chronology

  The Man from the USSR

  The Event

  The Pole

  The Grand-dad

  ESSAYS

  Introduction

  Playwriting

  The Tragedy of Tragedy

  Books by Vladimir Nabokov

  Footnotes

  Copyright ©1984 by the Article 3b Trust Under the Will of Vladimir Nabokov English translations and Introductions copyright ©1984 by Dmitri Nabokov “The Event” copyright 1938 by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright renewed 1966 by Vladimir Nabokov

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: Permissions, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Orlando, FL 32887.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977.

  The man from the USSR and other plays.

  Translated from the Russian.

  1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977—

  Translations, English. I. Nabokov, Dmitri. II. Title.

  III. Title: Man from the U.S.S.R. and other plays.

  PG3476.N3A26 1984 891.72’42 84-10862

  ISBN 0-15-156882-0

  ISBN 0-15-656945-0 (paperback)

  eISBN 978-0-544-10322-1

  v1.1012

  PLAYS

  Nabokov and the Theatre

  The relegation of writers to schools, movements, or social contexts, and the shrouding of their individuality in the mists of “influence” offer a fertile field for futile exercise. Father believed that the point of “comparative” literature was the exaltation of originality, not similarity. What mattered to him were the unique peaks, not the platitudinous plateau.

  The hunt for leitmotifs and other echoes within a given author’s oeuvre can also be an engrossing but pedestrian pursuit. Yet, certain special images and themes that flash and reverberate among Nabokov’s peaks do merit comment, because they illuminate key facets of his works.

  A fleeting refraction in many of Father’s compositions, and a constant undercurrent in most of his dramatic writing, is the theatricality of all things, the ambiguity of the fictional reality, the deliberate glimpse through the fabric of the fictional world, into its wings, under its surface. The butaforstvo—“proppiness”—of what shows through can be (deliberately) a little shoddy, as the bowels of real theatres tend to be; or comforting, if it allows us respite from some unsettling nightmare being played out onstage; or eerie, when we think that the world may be a stage, but that here the stage becomes a world whose workings are not limited to the progression of the play or novel on its more obvious levels, and where even the reality of unreality comes into doubt.

  The plays contain striking instances of such rippled reality: the “alternative” ending of The Waltz Invention, which is, in a sense, the protagonist’s dream self-edited; the key scene of The Event, where for a fragile, magic moment a totally new dimension transforms the secondary characters into painted decorations and Troshcheykin and his wife into what are perhaps their real selves, reinforcing what a reviewer called the “somnambulistic atmosphere”; the last page of The Grand-dad, where the protagonist, the Passerby, suddenly finds himself questioning the authenticity of all that has supposedly occurred; Kuznetsoff who, in The Man From the USSR, is challenged by Marianna’s barely camouflaged entreaty, “Why don’t you say something?” and replies, “Forgot my lines”; Olga Pavlovna saying to Kuznetsoff, “I don’t love you. There was no violin.”—even though we all clearly heard one at the beginning of the act. Indeed, the fourth act’s disordered, jumbled props and the “uneven gaps and apertures” through which peek the klieg lights of reality once removed (the film being shot in the offstage studio demystified by the exposure of its mechanical trappings) in themselves suggest the evanescent fragility of all that transpires before the audience. One is reminded of the haunting vacillations of reality in “A Visit to the Museum” and “Terra Incognita”; of the implication, with which Invitation to a Beheading concludes, that all the previous doings have been but theatrical artifice or someone’s nightmare; and, of course, of the juxtapositions of worlds and realities in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Ada, and Pale Fire.

  Closely related to the aura of a double reality is the double character, the so-called Nabokovian doppelgânger. The degree and the nature of the similarity between original and double—in the broad sense—may vary widely. The “pair” may consist of incidental characters with a modicum of physical resemblance, such as Meshaev One and Two in The Event:“...my brother and I were played by the same actor, only in the part of my brother he was good, and in mine he was bad.” Or they may be near-twins in name only and belong to opposing camps within the world of the play, like the intimidating, offstage Barbashin and the farcical Barboshin hired to foil him. The doubles may even exist only in portrait form : "...I painted two versions of him simultaneously on the sly: on one canvas as the dignified elder he wanted, and on the other the way I wanted him—purple mug, bronze belly, surrounded by thunderclouds” (a hint to the perceptive that there is something more to Troshcheykin than the rather unsympathetic façade he displays most of the time). Or there may be a dissimilar doppelg&nger, an unwelcome companion : the executioner who travels by tumbrel with his victim to the scaffold in The Granddad and ominously foreshadows the grotesque M’sieur Pierre of Invitation to a Beheading; or a stand-in whose resemblance to the protagonist exists only in the latter’s fantasy, as in Despair. The phenomenon of the double, in new and ingenious forms, was to play a crucial part in other novels as well:The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the unfinished Solus Rex and its reincarnation in Pale Fire, and, of course, A da, where the whole world is twinned. Nor let us forget “Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster”—a fragment of a larger, uncompleted work—and, of course, “The Original of Laura,” where Flora’s “exquisite bone structure slipped into a novel—became in fact the secret structure of that novel, besides supporting a number of poems.”1

  The voyage, in general; the scientific expedition, in particular; and what is, in a sense, their antithesis—return to Russia—comprise another recurring arpeggio in Father’s plays and other works. The idea of travel had tantalized him since childhood ; the adventures of Phileas Fogg were among his most exciting early reading (as they were the young Luzhin’s in The Defense). Ironically, the circumstances of exile would force him to travel more miles than Verne’s hero had covered by choice, but that travel, too, was often food for inspiration: consider the émigrés of his stories and novels jouncing in their fourth-class compartments, or poor Pnin who does not know that he is on the wrong train, or Humbert’s and Lolita’s crosscountry peregrinations. The conveyances and paraphernalia of travel had a romance all their own for Nabokov: witness the loving descriptions, autobiographical and fictional, of the veneered luxury expresses in their heyday, the lights of passing towns glimpsed upon lifting the leather blind of the Wagon-Lits, the trunks and nécessaires that accompanied the voyager. Witness also the elegant, appetizing, carefully selected baggage that survives Father in Montreux.

  But the voyage with a special purpose had even more importance in Father’s works. The thrill of the expedition always enchanted him. He confided to me
once, late in life, that his life had been marvellously happy, his ambitions achieved, and most of his dreams realized. Two of his intense yearnings, however, did remain unfulfilled, and both were related to travel.

  The first was to return to a non-Bolshevik Russia. Transformed by the kaleidoscope of his art, this idea finds its way, inter alia, into Glory(Martin’s disappearance into the depths of the Soviet Union), “A Visit to the Museum” (until an orthographic detail makes the hero realize that his nightmarish traverse of the museum has transported him spatially but not temporally, and he has exited into contemporary, Soviet Russia), and, of course,The Man From the USSR.

  Not only are Kuznetsoffs mysterious trips to the Soviet Union the central theme of the play, they are also the key to its whole atmosphere. Nabokov creates the illusion (as he does, in a different way, with the offstage Barbashin in The Event) that the real action is taking place elsewhere. This is true in a general sense: one has the feeling that the interpersonal relations around which the play itself revolves are overshadowed by much larger events occurring outside the stage, outside the theatre, outside the country. Kuznetsoff, in fact, sacrifices his sentiments and his married life in Berlin exile to his dangerous underground activities in Soviet Russia. In a more theatrical sense, as well, there is a curious contrast, in two of the acts, between the visible action and the physically larger, invisible happenings offstage (but which are, in fact, all only a backdrop for the onstage dialogue): the loud applause rewarding an inaudible lecture in the unseen auditorium; and the film set, the thundering megaphone, the repeated takes of the uprising scene beyond the prop-cluttered stage.

  These instances of juxtaposition are curiously reminiscent of the conclusion of Carmen(offstage, Escamillo executing the bull to the public’s cheers; onstage, the final, fatal exchange between Carmen and Don José in the deserted square outside the bullring). While Carmen was one of the operas Father liked, I would not go so far as to suggest that the parallel is intentional. Yet, not only is there a kinship between the theatrical tingles this effect generates in the two works, but one’s attention returns to how we perceive, or are meant to perceive, different levels of reality or of illusion, with a new twist. What presumably happens or exists offstage is, in the simplest sense, as much an illusion as what we see played out before us. We know perfectly well that a stage set is not a real room or a real square, and we know just as well that there is no real bullring beyond the operatic plaza, no forest marching on Macbeth, no plunge to the pavement for Tosca from the crenel of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Yet there is also an intermediate theatrical reality: is the spectator expected to consider offstage structures or events as real as what transpires onstage? Of course the offstage sham may be shattered by the intrusion of real-life proppiness, as when a plumpish Floria Tosca bounces visibly from an overly resilient mattress just beyond the battlement. But it may also be intended to be perceived as nothing more than sham compared to onstage events, or at least to have its credibility questioned. One suspects that Nabokov, while suggesting momentous goings-on elsewhere, tips his hand to the spectator just enough to make him doubt the authenticity of the offstage lecture hall and movie set and of Kuznetsoffs cloak-and-dagger doings; of Barbashin’s murderous intentions; of de Merival’s nightmarish recollection. Why is this done? The purpose—and effect—in these and other works of Nabokov’s is to make the spectator’s, or reader’s, attention rebound from somewhat dubious offstage matters, travel back, and focus with increased intensity on the visible microcosm of the play, causing him to perceive it in a relief that would not otherwise be so vivid.

  Theatrical works in general, when adapted to the screen, can cause a blurring of parameters. The cinema can even transport us from a rebuilt Globe Theatre to a realistic Battle of Agincourt, or from the grounds surrounding the Stockholm Opera House to a surreal recreation of Tamino’s trials in a cinematic limbo somewhere beyond the actual stage. Although Nabokov acknowledged that certain works of his had a “cinematic slant,”2 perhaps the Lolita screenplay should not be included in a list of his theatrical works, as it is here, but should instead be the nucleus of a separate essay entitled “Nabokov and the Cinema.”

  Related to the “theme” of travel that has led us to the above considerations is that of the impoverished wanderer, a fictional relative of the Russian émigré who moves from place to place and job to job. De Mérival describes his roamings and occupations (in The Grand-dad), after he has escaped from the scaffold:

  In dank and melancholy London I

  gave lessons in the science of duelling. I

  sojourned in Russia, playing the fiddle at

  an opulent barbarian’s abode....

  In Turkey and in Greece I wandered then,

  and in enchanting Italy I starved.

  The sights I saw were many; I became

  a deckhand, then a chef, a barber, a tailor,

  then just a simple tramp.

  His words are echoed by Fleming in The Pole:

  ....I’ve been a ship’s boy and a diver,

  hurled my harpoon upon uncharted seas. Oh,

  those years of seafaring, of wandering,

  of longing....

  And, in The Man From the USSR, Fyodor Fyodorovich repeats the theme: “For over two years now I’ve enjoyed the most humble professions—no matter that I was once an artillery captain.” More about the artillery captain later. Meanwhile, lest the reader misconstrue, let me make it clear that the point of these examples is not to spot some hypothetical symbolism or sublimation of the displaced person’s lot. Rather, it is to illustrate ways in which Father’s creative process integrated this element—whose embryo may perfectly well be traceable to one aspect of his own émigré existence—into new and exciting combinations.

  Nabokov’s second unfulfilled longing was for a lepidopterological expedition to some exotic, uncharted region. Father had dreamed of the Caucasus, of Mount Elbrus, but, in later years, spoke most often of the Amazon. Again, what is fascinating here is not the simple association of ideas or the romanticizing of an unrealized fantasy, but the poetry of the pattern into which the thoughts were recombined to produce “Terra Incognita,” the elder Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s fantastic entomological journeys in The Gift, the prophetic space adventures of “Lance,” and the touching mini-tragedy of The Pole.

  This last work is a deliberately free synthesis of the Scott diaries. Nabokov’s aim is not a precise journalistic reproduction but a rearrangement of elements into a concentrated interpersonal drama. Even the epigraph and its attribution—

  “He was a very gallant gentleman”

  (from Scott’s notebook)—

  are deliberately approximate. Scott did not write those words. They were left at the scene by the rescue expedition of 1912, led by E. L. Atkinson and A. Cherry Gerrard, which found the body. The exact wording was: “Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.” This inscription was mentioned in chapter twenty-one of Scott’s Last Expedition, of which Nabokov presumably saw the 1913 or 1915 edition in the South of France. The names, too, went through several generations of change and (except for Scott) never corresponded exactly to those of the actual expedition members. Scott, himself, incidentally, was named “Bering” in an early manuscript version. The passage, near the end of the play, that is purportedly excerpted from Scott’s diary was also deliberately adapted by Nabokov, as were many of the concrete details such as dates and distances. Even “Aurora australis” is changed to “Aurora borealis,” I imagine because only the latter term was current in Russia at the time and had, by extension, come to represent the southern lights as well as their northern analogues. Significantly, the only two passages that retranslate into direct citations from Scott are the most touching lines of all: “.... I may well be some time ... pronounced by Johnson in the play and Oates in Scott’s diaries, while taking leave of the others with the conscious intention of dying in the snow in order to lighten their burden; and Scott’s “I’m very sorry for my loyal companions.�
�� The lines

  It seems a pity, but I do

  not think I can write more....

  are the verbatim text of the final sentence of Scott’s diary, except for his signature and the post scriptum, “For God’s sake look after our people.” I returned to the original text for “It seems a pity...” because Father unquestionably had made a literal Russian translation of these lines, even though he has Scott speak them to Fleming rather than read them from his notebook.

  What had drawn Nabokov so strongly to these heroic explorers? Robert Falcon Scott was Britain at its best: unflinching in the face of danger, hardship, and pain, ever mindful of his companions’ welfare, and tenacious to the end in his pursuit of a goal that was at once physical exploit and scientific adventure. His pure courage, his passion for the precision and poetry of nature, and his compassion for all that surrounded him were not unlike Father’s own (and were later to be prototypical for the equally doomed Gregson of “Terra Incognita” and, to a degree, for the protagonist of “Lance”); Scott had a sense of humor as well, even in the direst circumstances (he addressed a final letter “To My Widow,” a thought transferred by Nabokov to the fictional Fleming, who says: “Kingsley has a fiancee, almost a widow”). Fleming tries stoically to be—or seem—an optimist, to express a glimmer of hope even when calamity seems certain. Kingsley, in mortal delirium, dreams of bringing his fiancee a penguin who will be “smoo-smoo-smooth.” (How Father loved saying “gla-gla-gladen’kiy ” to me when I was very small, and what a delicious memory I have of those liquid Russian syllables!) Scott and Johnson, in the play, are based on real persons, with a change of name in the second case; Fleming and Kingsley less so (there was a Kinsey, but he was not a member of the final party). But no matter: here, again, the characters and events of the actual Scott expedition are only a point of departure. What counts is how they are refocused and recombined into the world and the poetry of this touchingly human drama. A writer, said Nabokov, must see “the marvels of this century, the little things...[and:] the bag things, like the sublime liberty of thought, and the moon, the moon. I remember with what tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish, I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.”3 (And I remember with what consternation I heard a writer very popular in some circles announce, at a radical-chic dinner, that he hoped our astronauts would be marooned forever in space.)