Nabokov's Shakespeare

Samuel Schuman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628923773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Nabokov's Shakespeare is a comprehensive study of an important and interesting literary relationship. It explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century. As a Russian youth, Nabokov read all of Shakespeare, in English. He claimed a shared birthday with the Bard, and some of his most highly regarded novels ( Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada ) are infused with Shakespeare and Shakespeareanisms. Nabokov uses Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, from the most casual references to deep thematic links. Schuman provides a taxonomy of Nabokov's Shakespeareanisms; a quantitative analysis of Shakespeare in Nabokov; an examination of Nabokov's Russian works, his early English novels, the non-novelistic writings (poetry, criticism, stories), Nabokov's major works, and his final novels; and a discussion of the nature of literary relationships and influence. With a Foreword by Brian Boyd.

1

“The Sun’s a Thief:” Nabokov’s Shakespeare

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was not born on Shakespeare’s birthday. The date of his nativity under the Julian calendar, which was in use in Russia at the time of his birth, was April 10. That day, in Russia, corresponded in 1899, his birth year, to April 22 on the Gregorian calendar used in the West. But with the dawn of the twentieth century, the Julian or Old Style calendar lost another day to the Western version. Thus, his first birthday party, April 10, 1900 in Russia, would have corresponded to April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday— in, say Paris or Prague, Montreux or Ithaca, New York (Boyd, Russian Years, 37; Speak, Memory, 13–14). In the “foreword” to his autobiography, Nabokov mentions this “error” or “problem.” He professes his “calculatory ineptitude” leaves him unable to solve it—this from a composer of chess problems! In fact, Nabokov adopts the April 23 option by choice, noting that is also the birthdate of Shakespeare, his nephew Vladimir Sikorski, and Shirley Temple. But, amusingly, the traditional April 23 birthday of Shakespeare is also a day based on the Julian calendar: by the current, Gregorian version, the Bard was born on May 3! So, no matter which calendar one uses, or how cunning the calculation, Nabokov’s birthday and Shakespeare’s are not the same.

But Nabokov was a creator, a magician, a poet who could “give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” And one of his prime creations was himself. Given his assertion, in the afterword to Lolita that it had taken him “some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced with the task of inventing America,” the notion that, in some way, he created the persona of novelist Vladimir Nabokov is by no means improbable (Lolita, 312). And in that act of self-creation, Nabokov choose to link himself to the English writer he admired the most, from whom he learned the most, and whose works most penetrated his own. Ephim Fogel, Nabokov’s colleague at Cornell University in the 1950s, tells us: “He always said that the greatest writer, the one who had the greatest power of expressiveness ever produced on this planet, was Shakespeare” (232).

The title of this chapter comes from an important passage in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which gives its name to one of Nabokov’s finest novels:

I’ll example you with thievery:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,

And her Pale Fire she snatches from the sun.

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears. The earth’s a thief

That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n

From gen’ral excrement. Every thing’s a thief. (4. 3. 436–43)

It is no accident that Shakespeare’s words suggest a cosmos in which even the heavenly bodies borrow some of their luster from each other, and that Nabokov (and his character John Shade) borrow the phrase from Shakespeare.

In a world with no shortage of academic volumes on literary subjects, it makes sense to ask “Why this book?” I believe there at least five good reasons for Nabokov’s Shakespeare:

1. Since Nabokov was so strongly influenced by Shakespeare, and drew so often and in such varied ways from his works, we gain a significantly deeper understanding of his writings by studying the ways he viewed and used the work of the dramatist.
2. In an odd, Nabokovian, twist of time, we can also come to a better, more nuanced understanding of the earlier writer by exploring this connection. In examining Nabokov’s Shakespeare, we see how one quirky, brilliant, and sensitive non-academic intellect perceived Shakespeare and his works. This is especially interesting in that Nabokov’s native language was not English, so we can discover how Shakespeare’s words influenced a Russian consciousness. (Nabokov, however, read English before Russian, and his initial exposure to Shakespeare was in Shakespeare’s native tongue, not his own.)
3. Curiously, a number of contemporary authors who have been deeply influenced by Nabokov (e.g., Michael Chabon, Benjamin Hale, David Mitchell) show a kind of second generation of literary relationships. So, for example, Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is deeply indebted to Lolita, and it shares Lolita’s connections to The Tempest.
4. An examination of Nabokov’s use of Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s works offers an insight into the nature and varieties of literary influence. T. S. Eliot suggested that modern authors know more than Shakespeare knew: they know Shakespeare. Here, we have the opportunity to observe and analyze one author influencing another, across more than three centuries, and much of the globe.
5. Finally, the study of Shakespeare and Nabokov offers the unalloyed joy of wallowing in the words and works both of the greatest stylist the English language has yet produced, and of arguably finest wordsmith in our tongue of the twentieth century. These two authors teach us as well or better than any how much our language can do.

In Lolita, Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze journey across Nabokov’s invented America. One of the actual places through which they travel without ever pausing for long is the ghost town of Shakespeare, New Mexico.¹ Dolly and Humbert just go right past Shakespeare, but their creator, their sole begetter, Vladimir Nabokov, lingered!

Nabokov, English, and English literature

How did a Russian writer become so deeply linked to a Renaissance British dramatist? Surely, some part of this linkage derives from an inexplicable synchrony between the creative consciousnesses of two geniuses. But, on a far more pedestrian level, we can review the mechanisms which enabled such a strong connection to develop. Although it is not a new story, it is worth retelling the circumstances which brought Nabokov together with the English language, English literature, and, hence, its greatest author. That story involves the culture and history of pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual aristocracy, and the account of their post-revolutionary diaspora. More specifically, it revolves around the particularities of the Nabokov family at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

For many contemporary Americans, myself among them, our first image of pre-revolutionary Russia involved a kind of comic-book stereotype vision of two monolithic social classes. On the one hand, there was an oppressed peasantry of serfs and proletarians, living in abject and medieval rural poverty or Dickensian urban squalor. On the other side were the oppressors: opulent, self-indulging, cruelly exploitive fat cats. For those of us of a certain age, the character of Victor Komarovsky as depicted by Rod Steiger in David Lean’s 1965 film Doctor Zhivago typified our vision of the Russian ruling class at the turn of the twentieth century. Like most simple stereotypes, this one is seriously flawed. Some of those agricultural peasants had become prosperous agriculturalists; many had not. Russia’s cities supported merchants (large and small) and professionals (prosperous or struggling) like Pasternak’s Zhivago. And, importantly for the Nabokov saga, there were on the other side of the socio-economic divide progressive, intellectual aristocrats, such as those who were among the many Russians from many backgrounds who founded the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) party in 1905. A leader among that group was our author’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (b. 1870). V. D. Nabokov himself descended from a line of liberal, courageous, and highly educated aristocrats. He was, among other accomplishments, an uncompromising opponent of the virulent and often-violent Russian anti-Semitism which sparked murderous pogroms into the early years of the twentieth century. He was an opponent of capital punishment, a distinguished jurist, and a leader in the Provisional Government which attempted to build a constitutional model of politics in the brief period between the overthrow of the Czar and the triumph of the Communists.²

In such progressive families, as Vladimir Nabokov points out in the early pages of his autobiography, Anglophilism was rampant:

The kind of Russian family to which I belonged—a kind now extinct—had, among other virtues, a traditional leaning toward the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Pears soap … the English collapsible tub … “We could not improve the cream, so we improved the tube,” said the English toothpaste … Golden Syrup imported from London… All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English Shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls. (Speak, Memory, 79)

Much more to the point of Nabokov’s development as a literary artist was his early exposure not just to English soap and syrup, but to the English language:

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar—Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned … On later pages longer words appeared; and at the very end of the brown, inkstained volume, a real, sensible story unfolded its adult sentences … the little reader’s ultimate triumph and reward. I was thrilled by the thought that someday I might attain such proficiency. The magic has endured and whenever a grammar book comes my way, I instantly turn to the last page to enjoy a forbidden glimpse of the laborious student’s future, of that promised land where, at last, words are meant to mean what they mean. (Speak, Memory, 79–81)

His first exposure to more literary tales was also in English:

In the drawing room of our country house, before going to bed, I would often be read to in English by my mother … There were tales about knights whose terrific but wonderfully aseptic wounds were bathed by damsels in grottoes. From a windswept clifftop, a medieval maiden with flying hair and a youth in hose gazed at the round Isles of the Blessed … I particularly liked the blue-coated, red-trousered, coal-black Golliwogg [sic], with underclothes buttons for eyes, and his meager harem of five wooden dolls. (Speak, Memory, 81–2)

If his mother introduced young Vladimir to the Golliwogs, it was his father who probably first acquainted him with Shakespeare. According to Nabokov’s biographer, V. D. Nabokov’s favorite authors were Pushkin, Flaubert, and Shakespeare, and Vladimir Nabokov himself reports that by the age of fifteen he had read “all of Shakespeare in English” (italics mine) (Boyd, Russian Years, 91). It is difficult to imagine that many American or British school children, then or now, could make such a claim!

In the Russian Revolution, the constitutional and democratic aspirations of enlightened liberals such as V. D. Nabokov and the Kadets (the Constitutional Democratic Party) were crushed as surely as the monarchial traditions of czardom. The Nabokovs, like many other similar families, were forced to flee, first to the Crimea from 1917 to 1919 and then to Western Europe. In October of 1919, young Vladimir, just at the dawn of his third decade of life, was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge University in England. Although Nabokov focused much of his creative energy on writing Russian poetry at this time, he also read extensively in English and composed some English poetry, including one poem which was published.³ Before he graduated at the age of 23, he had published at least one other poem in English, as well as translations of verse from English to Russian.

It would be nearly two decades until Nabokov, now married to Vera Slonim and with a young son, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, fled a second totalitarian regime, as the Nazi empire spread across Western Europe. The Nabokovs settled in the United States, and Vladimir became an English-language novelist. But surely his childhood, youth, and young adulthood had given him a substantial grounding in the language and the works of Shakespeare.

Theme

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Vladimir Nabokov, the conclusion of Lolita

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Shakespeare, the final sestet of Sonnet 18

In many of their works, Shakespeare and Nabokov express a shared thematic vision. These themes are by no means exclusive to these two authors. But it is significant that Nabokov’s view of the place of humankind in the cosmos, our mortal, temporal, and consciousness limitations, and the potential to escap...

Table of contents

• FC
• Halftitle
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword Brian Boyd
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Me
• 1  “The Sun’s a Thief:” Nabokov’s Shakespeare
• 2  The Russian Works
• 3  “Which is Sebastian?” What’s in a (Shakespearean and Nabokovian) Name?
• 4  No Left Turn, or Something Rotten in the State: Bend Sinister and Hamlet
• 5  Hurricane Lolita: The Nabokovian Tempest
• 6  Tempest Point on the Bohemian Sea: Pnin
• 7  The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: Pale Fire and Timon of Athens
• 8  “O What a Noble Mind:” Ada and Hamlet
• 9  The Last Novels
• 10  A Miscellany of Other English Works
• 11  Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix: Nabokov and Shakespeare: A Quantitative Approach
• Works Consulted
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright