Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire

M. Couturier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137404596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nabokov gained international fame with Lolita, a highly erotic and morally disturbing novel. Through its comprehensive study of the amorous and sexual behaviors of Nabokov's characters this book shows how Eros, both as a clown or a pervert, contributes to the poetic excellence of his novels and accounts for the unfolding of the plots.

Part I

Eros’ Age-Old Tricks

1

The Tribulations of Adonis

First loves have always been a favorite subject for poets and novelists. Nabokov, before he undertook to write fiction, published a collection of poems composed when he was only sixteen and in love with a girl only a year younger, an episode of his life tenderly evoked in Chapter 12 of his autobiography, Speak, Memory. That first love, in the dream world of pre-Revolutionary Russia, may have been the secret source of many of his best novels, even of the most science-fictional or surrealistic one, Ada. The works studied in the present chapter, all written in Russian with one exception, that Chapter 12 of his autobiography, deal with various stages of a young man’s sexual initiation and discovery of love.

The inclusion of that chapter from his autobiography in an essay dealing only with his fiction calls for some explanation. In 1948, Nabokov wrote an autobiographical text, “First Love,” recounting his puppy love for Colette (actually called Claude Deprès) in Biarritz when he was only ten. This text was included in Speak, Memory but also later in a collection of short stories entitled Nabokov’s Dozen published in 1958. In the bibliographical note at the end of that collection, he said that “only ‘Mademoiselle O’ [a portrait of his Swiss governess, now Chapter 5 of Speak, Memory, a love story of a kind] and ‘First Love’ are (except for a change of names) true in every detail to the author’s remembered life.”¹ The variations between the different versions of these two texts, here published as autobiography, there as fiction, are slight and do not contribute in any way to promoting their autobiographical or fictional effect. Whenever Nabokov wrote about his childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia or in France, he apparently had the impression of writing about a poetic dream world no matter how hard he tried to be true to his “remembered life.” Sometimes, he felt that the fictional version of a past event was more accurate than the one he provided in his autobiography. This, I think, justifies the inclusion, in part two of the present chapter, of a study of Chapter 12 of his autobiography regarding his first idyll, an episode of his life which he fictionalized in his first novel, Mary, the first text analyzed here. “Chronologically,” the autobiographical text should come first but it seems preferable to reverse the order; as Nabokov recognized in the foreword to Mary, his first love was closer in his memory when he wrote his first novel than when he composed his autobiography twenty-five years later.

In the third text, Glory, a novel also partly autobiographical, the young protagonist, Martin, has two love affairs, the first one with a mature woman and the second with a girl about his own age who never acknowledges loving him. As for the fourth text, The Gift, it tells the story of a young man a great deal more mature than Martin and endowed with a real poetic talent, who is in love with a very gifted but not too sensuous girl.

1 An abortive replay: Mary

In his preface to the English translation of Mary, Nabokov openly acknowledged the autobiographical dimension of the novel: “Readers of my Speak, Memory (begun in the Nineteen-Forties) cannot fail to notice certain similarities between my recollections and Ganin’s. His Mary is a twin sister of my Tamara, the ancestral avenues are there, the Oredezh flows through both books [ . . . ].”² There is no reason why we should not take his word for it considering how secretive he was about the birth of many of his other works, and how insistently he claimed elsewhere that his protagonists were different from him. When he reread the novel after writing Chapter 12 of his autobiography, he was fascinated by the fact that “a headier extract of personal reality [was] contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful account,” the only explanation he could find being that his protagonist was “three times closer to his past” (xiv) than he was himself to his own past when he wrote Speak, Memory.

In Mary, Nabokov devised a clever, perhaps too pat, scenario to introduce Ganin’s evocation of his first love with Mary by arranging for him to meet Alfiorov who is waiting for the arrival of his wife, the latter being none other than Mary. Ganin, who has just had a brief and disappointing love affair with Lyudmila since his arrival at the guesthouse, begins his long anamnesis by recalling that strange sense of elation he experienced in his youth while recuperating from typhus: “One lay and floated and thought how one would soon be getting up: flies played in a pool of sun; and from Mother’s lap by one’s bedside a ball of colored silk, as though alive, jumped down and gently rolled across the amber-yellow parquet” (32). Freudians will prick their ears! In the wake of his illness, he went through a kind of depersonalization and started drifting away from his loving mother, already imagining the girl he was about to fall in love with before he even saw her: “In this room, where Ganin had recuperated at sixteen, was conceived that happiness, the image of that girl he was to meet in real life a month later [ . . . ]. The burgeoning image gathered and absorbed all the sunny charm of that room, and without it, of course, it would never have grown” (32–3). This experience, akin to an epiphany, was partly triggered by the acute sensitiveness subsequent to his disease and his seething hormones, but also by the fact that he had reached the point where he desired to find a love object he would be able to commune with both sentimentally and sexually. That desire is neither extravagant nor perverse; it is simply colored by his strong imagination, as well as by the poetic imagination of the author who was then reliving his first love mentally by writing about it. Ganin is no more a poet than Martin, the protagonist of Glory; yet he clearly shares the feelings and emotions of his highly sensitive and creative inventor as they are described in Chapter 12 of Speak, Memory.

Looking back, he is nearly unable to distinguish between the anticipated and the actual meeting: “Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another” (44). Here is the evocation of the actual meeting during a show in a barn nearby: “Ganin saw only one thing: he stared ahead at a brown tress tied with a black bow, slightly frayed at the edges, and his eyes caressed the dark, smooth, girlish sheen of the hair at her temple. Whenever she turned her face sideways to give the girl sitting beside her one of her rapid smiling glances, he could also see the strong color of her cheek, the corner of a flashing, Tartar eye, the delicate curve of her nostril alternately stretching and tightening as she laughed” (45–6). Looking at her from behind, he immediately recognizes the girl he had been dreaming of. She is unaware, apparently at least, of being admired by the boy behind her, hence her absence of coquettishness. It is her brown hair, with that frayed bow and that soft down on her temple he first focuses his attention and his desire upon, a suggestion that she must be hot-blooded, not one of those over-sentimental girls portrayed by la Comtesse de Ségure in the novels he and the author were familiar with.

Back home, he immediately takes refuge in an “old-fashioned water closet” whose window is “decorated by a stained-glass knight with a square beard and mighty calves” and experiences another epiphany: “And that moment, when he sat on the window ledge of that lugubrious lavatory, and thought he would probably never, never get to know the girl with the black bow on the nape of her delicate neck, and waited in vain for a nightingale to start trilling in the poplars as in a poem by Fet – that moment Ganin rightly regarded as the highest and most important point in his whole life” (46–7). This is evidently the lavatory described in Speak, Memory where the young enamored Vladimir composed his first love poems to Tamara. Ganin, though no poet, shares his creator’s admiration for Fet. Being in love for the first time is for him an experience infinitely more electrifying than anything else, including making love to Mary later.

During the following days, having decided to elope with her when she arrives from Russia, he relives, almost reenacts in his imagination, the more fervent moments of their love story, revisiting the places dear to him on the family estates. It was in the course of a bicycle ride in the woods that he finally met Mary, admiring her again from behind: “Ganin noticed her from a distance and at once felt a chill round his heart. She walked briskly, blue-skirted, her hands in the pockets of her blue serge jacket under which was a white blouse. As Ganin caught up with her, like a soft breeze, he saw only the folds of blue stuff stretching and rippling across her back, and the black silk bow like two outstretched wings” (48). Riding past her, “he never looked into her face but pretended to be absorbed in cycling,” his shyness being proportionate to his intense desire which he did not want her, an inaccessible butterfly, to notice. When he found her, in the company of other girls sheltering from a thunderstorm in a pavilion on a family estate, he feigned to play the arrogant landlord, saying it was “private property,” admiring her charms in the meantime: “She had adorable mobile eyebrows, a dark complexion with a covering of very fine, lustrous down which gave a specially warm ginger to her cheeks; her nostrils flared as she talked emitting short laughs and sucking the sweetness from a grass stalk; her voice was rapid and burry, with sudden chest tones, a dimple quivered at her open neck” (56–7). Lolita and Ada also share this lustrous skin and peach-like down. It is this subtle mixture of cockiness and vapory prettiness which obviously attracted Ganin, a combination which arouses many other young males in Nabokov’s novels.

The next trysts took place in various secret nooks. Ganin took Mary boating on the river in a scene which threatened to teem with clichés but that Nabokov managed to salvage by providing a poetic description of the surroundings. The portico of an Alexandrine mansion (clearly a replica of Uncle Ruka’s mansion), their refuge during that rather showery season, was the scene of his first tender exploration of her body: “And amid the hubbub of the autumn night, he unbuttoned her blouse, kissed her hot clavicle; she remained silent – only her eyes glistened faintly, and the skin of her bared breast slowly turned cold from the touch of his lips and the humid night wind” (67–8). The evocation of these scenes is rather tame; there is no indication that their caresses graded at that point into actual intercourse. They both feared that someone might spring upon them at any moment, a situation that had occurred at their last, very tender and wet tryst before returning to St.-Petersburg: “By the light of a match Ganin saw that the shutter of one of the windows giving onto the porch was open, and that a human face, its white nose flattened, was pressed against the inside of the black windowpane. It moved and slithered away, but both of them had had time to recognize the carroty hair and gaping mouth of the watchman’s son, a foulmouthed lecher of about twenty who was always crossing their path in the avenues of the park” (68). Ganin, in an outburst of anger and chivalry, broke the window and threw himself against the lout, beating him severely before climbing back “onto the porch to find the sobbing, terrified Mary” (69). This is a scene which keeps repeating itself throughout Nabokov’s work: whenever teenagers become tender or passionate, or are about to make love, they suddenly realize that they are being spied upon by some young boy or even a mature man, an event which dampens their sexual excitement and often irremediably mars their feelings. Nabokov had a similar experience with Tamara as he explains in Chapter 12 of Speak, Memory. It was a traumatic experience, to judge from the repetition of those scenes elsewhere in his work.

Back in St.-Petersburg, Mary and Ganin were unable to renew their tender embraces, partly because of the wind and frost and snow (“a miniature snowfall would drop from his astrakhan cap onto her naked breast”) but above all because the city was all eyes, conspiring against them: “Every love demands privacy, shelter, refuge – and they had no such refuge” (70). The following summer, he went to see Mary in a park in the small town where she was vacationing and finally made love to her, but the experience was not accompanied by the anticipated fireworks: “In silence, his heart thumping, he leaned over her, running his hands along her soft, cool legs. But the public park was alive with odd rustling sounds, somebody seemed to be continuously approaching from behind the bushes, the chill and the hardness of the stone slab hurt his bare knees; and Mary lay there too submissive, too still.” Cold and frustrated, he immediately claimed that he did not love her anymore (73), a not infrequent occurrence in Nabokov’s novels; earlier in Mary, Ganin drifted away from Lyudmila after making love to her. It was not only because of the unsettling venue and of the fact they feared that they might be spied upon that Ganin stopped loving Mary, but because the actual act of lovemaking was a clear disappointment as compared with the previous stages of their growing fervor for each other.

The next summer, Mary did not vacation in the country; she “did not write or telephone, while he was busy with other things, other emotions” (73) – that is, with other amorous adventures. They accidentally met again on a train later but she had considerably changed: “It made Ganin terribly sad to look at her: there was something odd and timid in her whole appearance; she smiled less and kept turning her head away. On her tender neck there were livid marks, like a shadowy necklace, which greatly suited her” (74). Life had obviously been hard on her, as it had been hard on many people in Russia around that time. Ganin never saw her again but she wrote him five letters he kept in his wallet and rereads now at the guesthouse in Berlin in preparation for their reunion at the station – a cliché which probably made Nabokov grind his teeth with mortification later in life. Ganin had received those letters in Crimea just before leaving Russia; he answered only the first one but evidently declined to pursue this idyll in an epistolary manner. She pleaded with him to write her, doing her best to lure him back, quoting poems and recalling their happy moments, but to no avail.

Only when leaving the country did he realize that he still loved her. Stepping ashore and seeing “a blue-clad Turk on the quayside asleep on a mountain of oranges – only then did he feel a clear, piercing sense of how far he was from the warm mass of his own country and from Mary, whom he loved forever” (102). Retrospectively, he associates the lost motherland, that “warm mass,” with Mary whom he thought he had stopped loving but still loves dearly as he realizes. Now that he is a man in exile, his nostalgia becomes palpable and takes on the image of his first love. He is fooling himself, though, when he claims to vow eternal love for Mary as he suddenly realizes with a shock at the very moment that he is about to meet her at the station; spontaneously, he decides to take a train for France without seeing her. Since the discovery that she has married Alfiorov, he has been replaying the tragedy of loss, the loss of his native country and of the enchanted places on the family estates, and the loss of his first love, two losses which cannot be dissociated from each another. He may have thought, also, that if she agreed to marry such a dreadful man, she herself might have lost some of the charms that had made her so dear to him years before. The loss is too radical and structural to be cancelled out by a fake reunion at the station. Yet, he has spent a wonderful week mentally reliving that marvelous experience and he will supposedly continue to treasure that first love all his life, as did his inventor who replayed his own first love and the ensuing loss not only in Speak, Memory, his autobiography, but in many of his major novels, especially Ada.

In this first novel, moving at times, Nabokov failed to distance himself from his own past: he was too close to the events he was narrating to be able to develop the kind of sophisticated rhetoric which has made him famous since. Yet, we find here a number of topoi which will reappear constantly in the following novels: the first image of the girl from behind, her ambiguous looks, the lovers’ fear of being spied upon, and the sense of loss. Nabokov will later manage to construct more and more poetic works with the same ingredients.

2 Love and loss: Speak, Memory

Nabokov was sixteen when he met his first love in the countryside fifty miles from St.-Petersburg. In Chapter 12 of his autobiography, he relates at one and the same time the major episodes of that idyll with the girl he calls Tamara (her real name was Valentina Shulgina, but he called her Lyussya), the circumstances of his escape with his family from St.-Petersburg to the Crimea after the October Revolution and their emigration to Western Europe, events which durably impressed him with a heart-rending sense of loss.

The chapter opens upon a joint reference to Tamara and the Revolution: “When I first met Tamara – to give her a name concolorous with her real one – she was fifteen, and I was a year older. The place was the rugged but comely country (black fir, white birch, peatbogs, hayfields, and barrens) just south of St.-Petersburg. A distant war was dragging on. Two years later, that trite deus ex machina, the Russian Revolution, came, causing my removal from the unforgettable scenery.”³ Nabokov knew of the existence of this girl before he met her, contrary to Ganin who only dreamt in advance of the girl he was about to fall in love with: “During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara’s name had kept cropping up (with the feigned naïveté so typical of Fate, when meaning business) here and there on our estate (Entry Forbidden) and on my uncle’s land (Entry Strictly Forbidden) on the opposite bank of the Oredezh” (554). The c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Eros’ Age-Old Tricks
• Part II Sterile Perversions
• Part III Creative Perversions
• Epilogue: Eros’ Denials
• Bibliography
• Index