The Key To Understanding Nabokov’s Fiction
Due to several reasons Vladimir Nabokov is a very complicated author. One can only understand him if he is aware of how to approach his texts. If you know what to pay special attention to, which ideas to seek for between the lines, how to perceive his works. In this post I want to share with you some key features of Nabokov’s poetics which can help you better and deeper understand his texts.
Nabokov’s philosophy
There are a lot of ideas and concepts which play specific role in Nabokov’s texts and it is impossible to outline all the multifaceted ideas and theories which were crucial for him in one post.
But still it might be helpful to know that Nabokov had a special attitude to patterns, combinations, illusion and illusiveness, concepts of fate, blindness and transparency, memory and the process of remembering, repetitions, phenomena of self-consciousness and shame, symmetry, ordered sequences, butterflies, puns (quite often — multilingual), texts inside other texts, etc. When reading Nabokov it is important to pay attention to all these things and try to understand the ideas which are hidden behind them — it can be very helpful in understanding of the text.
If you feel like reading more about Nabokov’s philosophy, you can check for example J. W. Connolly’s monography «Nabokov and his fiction».
The basis of Nabokov’s texts
Here I collected some of the fundamental features of Nabokov’s fiction world which determine the way we should approach his stories.
Specific of the narrator’s role
In order to understand Nabokov’s fiction correctly it is crucial to know that he considered the identification of the real author and the narrator in the text to be an aesthetic sin. This aspect of Nabokov’s fiction is especially important to remember when reading «Lolita». This novel is being — for obvious reasons — very often misunderstood exactly because the readers are unaware of this feature.
The thing is, in Nabokov’s texts written in first person the narrator is always unreliable. It means, that the narrator tells us his own version of the events which happened to him, but this version is not necessarily truthful. Actually, quite opposite — the unreliable narrators by definition never tell us the whole truth. The unreliable narrator only cares for the reader to believe him. And the reader, in turn, needs to be aware of this and of strategies which help him recognize the deception. When reading the story the reader should pay attention to details which signal a different narrative hidden under the one which the narrator suggests us.
Approximation of the text to the experience of the real life
It does not mean that Nabokov «correctly depicts the reality» (by the way, I have a post devoted to this question — whether literature is supposed to correspond to reality). It means that Nabokov especially complicates the perception of his texts. The reader does not understand what for he is struggling through a lot of tiny unrelated episodes and when the setup will come which might explain what is going on in the text. This way of perceiving the text is very close to our experience of living our lives. We are also unaware of what happens with us in the future and how all the minor everyday events will influence it [1].
Nabokov deliberately violates one of the most important principles of the Russian classical literature. His texts do not contain a core, a straight semantic sequence of the episodes which was typical for Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov and other Russian writers. They did everything possible to make the logic of the text clear to the reader.
Nabokov, in contrast to the Russian classical writers of the XIX century, pushes the reader to a false interpretation of the facts and does not give him any clue to what is going to happen in the story next.
The most important moments of his texts fade out and go unnoticed by the reader. The core line of the plot is entangled by a network of side-lines concealing her. The reader does not have superiority over the heroes which he used to have when he read the XIX century fiction and knew more than the characters of the story. In order to complicate the perception of the text even more Nabokov places cause-and-effect relationships from the beginning to the end, but not from the end to the beginning [1].
When reading Nabokov’s texts we get acquainted with occasional characters that appear and then disappear, fragments of someone else’s conversations, casual encounters, etc. The details of the narrative are not differentiated or labelled in any way, because neither are the details of our lives. These episodes are just as difficult to navigate through as the flow of the daily life.
So what is the reader supposed to do with all this mess of facts?
The thing is, Nabokov wants the reader to recall the novel in his memory as soon as he finished reading it.
Only in this case will he understand the text in the whole. The scenes which at the first reading slipped out of the reader’s sight will begin to gain meaning and overlapping each other and these memories will lead to the acquisition of meaning.
Just like in the real life we understand some events better over the course of time, when we retrieve them in our memory.
The dual reality of the text
This is one of the most important principles of Nabokov’s fiction world. It can be understood in different ways.
On the one hand, there can be an aesthetic duality of the world. Then the worlds created by an artist are opposed to the real world (which is also considered to be a text, but someone else’s text). On the other hand, we can understand the dual reality in the existential sense. Then there are two parallel real worlds. This interpretation by the way correlates with Nabokov’s life — he was an emigrant and lived in a foreign world, at the same time keeping the world he had forever lost in his memory.
The difficulty for us as for readers of Nabokov’s texts is that Nabokov does not hint on the presence on the second world. Quite opposite, he hides the most important signs which could demonstrate its existence. And the reader must make an effort in order to reveal the second world.
All Nabokov’s texts are constructed from the premise that the artist should study the world created by God and recycle, rebuild it, combine its elements and create a new and completely different individual world.
The author of the text is kind of a God who is present everywhere, but can be seen nowhere. He creates the new worlds when playing and destroys them also when playing [2]. This idea is strongly connected with the next feature of Nabokov’s poetic.
The concept of the game
Who is playing with whom?
Firstly, the author is playing with his heroes. (Being a God of his fiction world he kinda can afford it…). For example the main character of the novel «The Defense»* Luzhin interprets the repeated events of his life as chess combinations, moves made by his invisible opponent, although not on a chessboard but in the real life. Nabokov is playing with his hero in order for the reader to understand that Luzhin practically can not live without chess. Chess means life for him [2].
Secondly, the author is constantly playing with the reader. Due to this a lot of episodes in Nabokov’s stories have several equal interpretations. For example, the end of «The Defense» can be perceived in different ways. Luzhin jumps out of the window and when he is in the air his eternity is revealed to him as a chessboard. We can think that it is symbol of Luzhin’s immortality as a chess player. We can also interpret it as a presaging of Luzhin’s life beyond the grave. There might be also the third interpretation, that the chessboard is the board of the novel and Luzhin will always remain on this board and we will keep going back to this story over and over again as long as literature exists.
There can be definitely more than one interpretation of the end of this novel and it is a manifestation of the so called playful poetics which characterized Nabokov’s texts [2].
Nabokov differs from Russian classical authors a lot
On the one hand, Nabokov might be the most non-Russian author of all the Russian authors. The critics of 1930-s constantly accused Nabokov of imitating Western literature models and abandoning the heritage of Russian literature. The critics were actually right, because Nabokov’s texts originate not from Tolstoy’s or Dostoevsky’s tradition. There is no moral or religious semantic load in his texts which is so typical for the great Russian novels of the XIX century. Being a convinced fan and continuer of Flaubert, Nabokov followed a different tradition. Unlike Russian classical writers of the XIX century, he does not provide the reader with any moral judgments in his novels.
The moral in his texts is not imposed on the reader. The reader must learn the moral lessons himself through active interaction with the text and analyses [3].
On the other hand, it is impossible to understand Nabokov without knowing Russian classical literature. A very intense dialogue with the other texts of Russian literature is happening in most of his texts. Nabokov parodies classical authors and quotes them, plays with them and sneers at them and their characters [3]. All these games are incomprehensible without the knowledge of Russian classical literature.
Nabokov wants the reader to be active
You might have noticed that in the previous parts of the post I said that Nabokov does not help his readers understand the text. He plays with the reader and deliberately complicates the narrative making the reader not just passively consume the plot and the moral, but to work, constantly correlate ends and beginnings of story, link the details scattered throughout the text with each other [1].
In the novel «Bend Sinister» Nabokov rephrased one of king Solomon’s proverbs:
«The glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it».
This is the way Nabokov communicates with his reader: the author hides things and the reader needs to find them. The key to understanding his texts is to read them slowly and attentively, stop at the puzzles Nabokov asks and sometimes even use a dictionary, an encyclopedia or internet in order to solve it. Revealing one by one all those small mysteries hidden in the text and matching them with the concepts which were important for the author you will gain much more from the text rather than just its plot or the portrayal of characters.
I think, this is actually the most important thing to know about this author. It is impossible to read all the monographies about his fiction world (I mean, in case you are not specializing on Nabokov…) and fully understand all of them. But it is possible to remember the main concepts crucial for Nabokov and thus pay special attention not only to the plot of his stories, but also to these hidden signs which may shed light on some aspects of the text you would not have noticed without this knowledge.
Of course, in this post I could only describe some of the important features of Nabokov’s poetics in the most general terms. There is so much more to say about it, that several dissertations could have been written on each of the «keys» to Nabokov’s texts I mentioned… But I hope it made Nabokov’s texts a bit more comprehensible for you.
I also found it very enjoying to write about Nabokov’s fiction! It is just like playing a very complicated game. I think one day I will write a series of posts devoted to more detailed analysis of some of his novels…
P.
Literature:
- Russian Literature Abroad (1920–1940). Textbook for higher educational institutions of the Russian Federation. SPb, 2013. 848 p.
- https://arzamas.academy/materials/1615
- https://arzamas.academy/materials/1614
- https://arzamas.academy/materials/1619
If you enjoyed this post, you can read some of my other texts:
