That two such diverse men of science as Charles Darwin (1809-1882), and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), could contemplate in their autobiographies a self-shaping consciousness beyond physical life may give pause for thought. Nabokov’s intertwined careers as artist and scientist were marked by a highly developed self-regard, a refusal to accept that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”² Nabokov took this state of affairs personally: “[O]ver and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.”³ Darwin, too, contemplated the “impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.”⁴ Both sought to write their lives, Darwin near the end and Nabokov as it were “nel mezzo,” so as to give a more intimate portrait of their inner selves. It is my thesis that Nabokov wrote his life as an extension of his artistic and scientific search for truth, expressed through patterns of existence as shaped by memory, patterns that did not exclude the possibility of a metaphysical realm.

In a review of of Speak, Memory in The New Republic in 1967, Alfred Appel, Jr. attempted to link Nabokov’s autobiography to his fiction. “A book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory… Lolita is the last book one would offer as ‘autobiographical,’ but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul.”⁵ Impliedly, much in Nabokov’s fiction is at least thematically, directly or indirectly, connected to his autobiographical writings. Is the obverse also true? Are fictional elements also embedded in his autobiography?

Appel outlines six closely related “autobiographical themes” that inform Nabokov’s fiction, as well as the autobiography. He posits Nabokov’s work, all his work, as adopting a “strategy of involution,”⁶ a figured spiral expressed through parody, coincidence, patterning, self-referential mirroring, staging and the intruding voice of an authorial deity. The whole enterprise, novel or autobiography, comes to what Appel alludes to as a “vertiginous conclusion,”⁷ and appears to spiral back upon itself to its beginnings. Examples are close at hand:

“And now,” he said, “I am going to tell you the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women’s Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture.”⁸

“There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” ⁹

“I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments.”¹⁰

In Speak, Memory Nabokov seeks to control the past and make it his own through what Mariia Malikova has referred to as “the fictionalization of fact.”¹¹ One form of such fictionalization, not uncharacteristic of Nabokov as a modernist, meta-fictional writer, is the introduction of his fictional self into the “autobiographical” text, a self described by the narrator who may or not be Nabokov, a self at least partially concealed behind his nom de plume, Sirin. Thus the “narrator,” taking up the roles of literary historian and literary critic, introduces a “fact,” a partially true fact and partially fictionalized pseudo-fact standing for the role Sirin played in Russian émigré culture in the 1920s and 1930s:

“But the author who interested me most was naturally Sirin. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in 1925 and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics.”¹²

In paragraph one of Ada a similar “fictionalization of fact” occurs. The first “fact” to be fictionalized for the initiated reader comes by way of the inversion of Tolstoy’s famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. In Ada, happy families are now dissimilar, unhappy families alike. For those with Russian, Anna jarringly sports a masculine patronymic. Echoing the novel’s subtitle, a “family chronicle” is invoked, setting off bucolic Aksakovian chords for lovers of Russian literature. And then “another Tolstoy work” is given in translation with an incomplete and partially incorrect title, to be decoded only by readers possessing Russian. One needs to know that the unknown translator of Childhood and Fatherland mistook otechestvo (fatherland) for otrochestvo (boyhood) and that the full, original title comprised a trilogy: Childhood. Boyhood. Youth. [Детство. Отрочество. Юность.] The jumbling of linguistic codes demonstrated here is metaphorical for the inversions and jests of real and imaginary geography, Terra and Antiterra, and a trope for the family chronicle of the Veens that ultimately leads in part to a reimagining and attempted reification of a lost Arcadian world. It transitorily contains a world reminiscent of the one depicted in Chapter Three of Speak, Memory, where there is “[A] sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth … Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die”¹⁴

There is another layer of fictionalization pertaining to Nabokov’s withholding of information in Speak, Memory that casts a shadow over the idyllic portrait he paints of his younger years. In this connection we have Nabokov’s comparison of his childhood to that of his son Dmitri: “Comparing my childhood to his, I somehow recall far more fears, obsessions, nightmares, than he generally feels. There was a picture in one book that caused me such a secret terror (though it showed nothing special) that the book’s presence on my shelf was unbearable.”¹⁵ Noting the emphasis on the “extraordinary sense of happiness and security” in the autobiography, Brian Boyd speculated that Nabokov in his fictional works “inverted his own positives in order to test them.”¹⁶ In 1993 Boyd reconsidered his assessment, relying on a letter from Nabokov to his wife’s cousin Anna Feigin in February 1944, wherein comments regarding multiple weekly nightmares throughout his adult life provide a basis to reconsider the driving forces behind his writings. One might note that Nabokov speaks of his “secret terror” regarding his childhood fears of a picture in a book. Thus, he hides his terror from those close to him, especially his parents, creating within his own intimate surroundings among his family and later among readers of his autobiography a fiction about his easy-flowing, brilliant childhood, putatively free of fear, filled with beauty, love and intellectual excitement.

In great contrast to the dynamic text of Speak, Memory, are the photographs found within it. The earlier versions of Nabokov’s autobiography, Conclusive Evidence (1951) and Other Shores (Другие берега, 1954), contain only text. Mariia Malikova posits the photographs in Speak, Memory as a deadening of text and a challenge to Nabokov’s mastery of the book’s content. Such a challenge is overcome in her view by the addition of photographic captions. One candid snapshot by his wife Véra of Nabokov at work writing The Defense (Защита Лужина), in February 1927 is exceptional. After a masterly two-hundred word descriptive caption Nabokov sums up his thoughts: “[S]eldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely.”¹⁷ He then cannot resist a vignette to enhance the photograph:

“Many years ago, in St. Petersburg, I remember being аmused by the Collected Poems of a tram conductor, аnd especially by his picture, in uniform, sturdily booted, with a pair of new rubbers on the floor beside him and his father’s war medals on the photographer’s console near which the author stood at attention. Wise conductor, farseeing photographer!”¹⁸

Nabokov left no doubt that science and art were at the zenith of human endeavor and proceeded from the same highly organized and imaginative core. In an interview from 1967, he opined:

“My passion for lepidopterological research, in the field, in the laboratory, in the library, is even more pleasurable than the study and practice of literature, which is saying a good deal. … There is no science without fancy and no art without facts.²⁰

“I would say that imagination is a form of memory. … An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may want to use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.”²¹

“…the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events.”²²

Chapter 16 of Conclusive Evidence had been excised and not published in Nabokov’s lifetime. It appears as an appendix to the Brian Boyd edited Speak, Memory in the Everyman’s Library edition of 1999, as well as an appendix (приложение), to Mariia Malikova’s 2002 study: Набоков: Авто-био-графия. Chapter 16 tells us much about his thinking when composing the text, much that can be applied to the later emerging of Speak, Memory from the combined, reshaped and revisited chrysalis of Conclusive Evidence and Other Shores (Другие берега). Characteristically, the autobiography is explicated by a character, a fictional book reviewer who is not only writing about “On Conclusive Evidence,” but is also reviewing When Lilacs Last by a certain Miss Braun, “the daughter of a great American educationalist,” which embodies a “deep human glow that suffuses every page.”²³

By invoking an anonymous reviewer, Nabokov is able to blend parody of large-circulation reviewer-eze that promotes gushing, simple-minded teleological autobiography, with a serious analysis of his own work. While it is difficult in reading this pseudo-review to winnow the chaff from the grain of true Nabokovian meaning, the following has the feel of authenticity:

“The unraveling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind. All thematic lines mentioned are gradually brought together, are seen to interweave or converge, in a subtle but natural form of contact which is as much a function of art, as it is a discoverable process in the evolution of a personal destiny. … To the same point of convergence other thematic lines arrive in haste, as if consciously yearning for the blissful anastomosis provided jointly by art and fate. The solution of the ‘riddle’ theme is also the solution of the theme of exile, of the ‘intrinsic loss’ running through the whole book, and these lines blend, in their turn, with the culmination of the ‘rainbow’ theme (‘a spiral of life in an agate’) and merge, at a most satisfying rond point, with the many garden paths and park walks and forest trails meandering through the book.”²⁴

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Speak, Memory, and the texture of Nabokov’s prose in general, is his use of the pathetic fallacy by means of biological or anthropomorphic metaphors. The use of “anastomosis,” (the interconnection and convergence among such things as blood vessels and brain neurons), for example, in the passage cited above is characterized as the result of the “conscious yearning” of thematic lines. Such animate metaphors are part of what Stephen H. Blackwell has recently referred to as the “holistic attitude [that] characterizes Nabokov’s thought about art and about nature as well: a species is not a static unity, but rather a mobile multiplicity.”²⁵ By means of anthropomorphic metaphors Nabokov attempts to figure the quintessentially human into the what he proposes to be the simultaneity of space-time. Take the following truncated passage, for example, with its quotidian, down-to-earth human gestures embedded in the infinity of time and space:

“…in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. …the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. …an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events [my italics, J.K.], of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.”²⁶

Consciousness remains for Nabokov the ultimate mystery. Blackwell interprets “consciousness” in the work not as the teleological end-point for cognition within a Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary change, but “as a mode or principle of being …, which manifests itself in the forms that emerge within its progress, … It thus would be part of the stuff of nature, constantly appearing, not the goal as such.”²⁷ For Nabokov “the groping arms of consciousness” create not random but free features, such as some Humbert Humbert whose furtive and frenetic sexuality has no survival utility and thus stands “outside cause and effect.”²⁸ Blackwell describes such free features as “the transformation of a particular biological, or physical, problem into an artistic, or ideal solution. The ‘problem’ is the breakdown of biological procreation; the ‘solution’ is the expansion of human consciousness into a truly creative entity and the ‘reality’ of its creative products.”²⁹ For Nabokov memory equals reality, a “time recovered and saved from loss,”³⁰ a temps retrouvé in which everything, including the blackness behind and before us, remains timeless, and in that sense, through the magical alchemy of his art, no one ever dies.

NOTES

1. Darwin, Charles. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882. Ed., Nora Barlow. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958), p. 21. Darwin wrote most of his autobiography between May and August, 1876.
2. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p.19.
3. Ibid., p. 20.
4. Darwin, Charles. Ibid., p. 92.
5. Ibid., p. 2. Nabokov begged to differ in Strong Opinions, p. 77. “Speak, Memory is strictly autobiographic. There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita.”
6. Op. Cit., p. 3.
7. Op. Cit., p. 6.
8. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pnin. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 191.
9. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 309-310.
10. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), p. 301.
11. Маликова, Мария. В. Набоков: Авто-био-графия. (Санкт-Петербург: Академический проект, 2002), С. 67.
12. Speak, Memory. Op. cit., p. 287.
13. One may note here Nabokov’s reference to his Sirin days in the “Foreword” to Strong Opinions, (Vintage, 1973), where he states on page xvii: “…’V. Sirin,’ evoked with mixed feelings by émigré memoirists, politicians, poets, and mystics, who still remember our skirmishes of the nineteen-thirties in Paris.”
14. Nabokov. Speak, Memory. p. 77.
15. Brian Boyd. Cycnos, Vol. 10/1, p. 5-6. 1993. Quoting from a letter of February 5, 1944 from Nabokov to Anna Feigin, Véra Nabokov’s cousin.
16. Boyd. Ibid. p. 6.
17. Nabokov. Speak, Memory. Snapshot opposite page 256.
18. Ibid., p. 256.
19. Чехов, Антон П., Собрание сочинений. Том 3, (М.: ГИХЛ, 1961), С. 258. «Унтер Пришибеев», 1885.
20. Vladimir Nabokov. Strong Opinions. (New York: Vintage International, 1990), pp. 78-79.
21. Ibid., p. 78.
22. Op. Cit., p. 186.
23. Vladimir Nabokov. Speak, Memory. (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1999), p. 247.
24. Ibid., ‘Chapter sixteen’ or ‘On Conclusive Evidence,’ p. 250.
25. Stephen H. Blackwell. The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Wonders of Science. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), p. 51.
26. Nabokov. Speak, Memory. (Vintage), op. cit., 218.
27. Blackwell. Ibid., pp. 73-74.
28. Blackwell. Op. cit., 79.
29. Blackwell. Op. cit., 85.
30. Denis Hollier, ed. A New History of French Literature. (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, Third printing, 2001), p. 862. “Death and Literary Authority,” by Leo Bersani, pp. 861-866.

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