As to why I love Russia so much--the language and the culture--despite the former's difficulty and the latter's abundance of problems... This is something hard to answer, like any complex love developed over a number of years. I do know why I started studying it -- the literature. Ruslit is a glorious discipline unto itself, and its wealth is surprising, given that it developed relatively late. Russian literature was largely nonexistent until the nineteenth century; something about the largely illiterate population (but then again, most world populations were illiterate relatively recently), or the way nobles were so fiercely subject to the tsar, or the relative isolation from the influences of the West until Peter the Great had its way... regardless, Ruslit's first real hero was arguably Gogol, anyway a Ukrainian, vernacular and pungent, born in 1809 and matchlessly adept at pissing off the tsar. Russian literature was an infant compared to English literature, German lit, or French lit; and yet somehow even in its infancy it came out dancing. A clumsy Cossack reel. Reeking terribly, and speaking fiercely, an extreme and volatile condition of humanity. Dostoevsky's heroes are gnomic and coarse, wheeling, blind-sided and half-drunk, into their terrible fates. When I read these guys in high school, and also especially the bitter tonic of Soviet poets, I knew I had to learn the language they could pulse and be in. So I plunged into six cases and a set of phonics I described in a freshman-year blog post as "a glorious mouthful of throat cold." I haven't looked back since.
But all this brings me back to a certain Nabokov. He's always on people's lips, especially studiers of Russian, and especially around here, where he did something private and fetishistic with collecting butterflies; a friend unsuspecting of my animosities sent me an email when the Crimson (our newspaper) was doing an article about him, asking whether, given the sympathies mentioned above, I studied Nabokov.
Well.
I hate Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, insofar as you can hate someone who is (a) dead and (b) not a known committer of heinous crimes and (c) taught at Harvard and collected butterflies.
I am a compulsive finisher of books. It is near-physically painful for me to put down a book before I've finished it, and especially given how bumbling I am with objects this has resulted in more than one tearful loss on my part. I have finished books that took me eight months to a year to finish; I have finished books that I put down for seven months for a breather in the interim; I have finished books I actively and outwardly scorned, complaining all the while. But I just couldn't finish Lolita.
I got past all the tricky bits, too--the whole car chase, the florid word games, the steamiest of the rapes. But something in me snapped when poor pregnant Lolita was taking her stand and I just couldn't go on.
I guess in my head Nabokov is always, oddly, paired with Steinbeck--someone he would have undoubtedly scorned. Nabokov was all about scorning--there's one magnificently crabby interview with him in the Paris Review which is more than worth a full read.
A choice quote is here:
NABOKOV
... Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.
...INTERVIEWER
What have you learned from Joyce?
NABOKOV
Nothing.
etc.
Anyway, what's in common between Nabokov and Steinbeck? Arguably nothing, besides some passion for cars in an American milieu, a kind of restlessness. No doubt Nabokov would have condemned Steinbeck as a simpering American--with his cutting word, "poshlost," about which more later in a subsequent post. (The quick definition, also in that interview: " Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ") I find pairing the two, Steinbeck and Nabokov, in my head is most intriguing because of a fundamental opposition. Maybe one I invented. I read them in subsequent summers--I read East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath on my farm-summer, working out in the fields and reading into the setting sun. And I tried to stumble through Pale Fire and quit, puttered out, in my summer in Russia.
I guess what really bugs me about Nabokov--something I can't be mollified in by his stylistic pyrotechnics-- is ... well, the cumulative effect of reading too much of his work is a kind of attrition for your respect for humanity. At least mine. Nabokov is a jeerer; which is all well and good, there's a lot to jeer at in every society. But too much jeering and your face gets stuck in a grimace...Tolstoy always said that he intended Anna Karenina to be a very different book; Anna became so sympathetic a character almost of her own accord. In a piece of Nabokov's writing, everything feels very tightly controlled. And the jeer shows through everything. Tanned Lolita, the embodiment of temptation, is a cruel joke; the one book of his I've managed to finish, Laughter in the Dark, tellingly culminates in a man being blinded, then shot, by his kittenish sixteen-year-old lover. At the end of the day, the fate of the poor lecher is meant to be funny--his guts spilling on the floor, and the little lady absconding with the gun, into the sunset with the man he's been inadvertently financing her flings with. But I find it hard--maybe I take myself too seriously, am too easily offended--I find it hard to view a human being as a punch line. The joke falls flat, hollow, and makes a ghastly echo. I'm too ready to forgive the poshlost in others, recognizing it so fully in myself.
Which is where Steinbeck comes in. What made Steinbeck so powerful for me, in a very lonely summer when I tripped all over myself in a grotesque parody of manual labor and chopped rhubarb until I couldn't see straight, was the power of his forgiveness. For every crude broad character, for every archetypical exchange, there was a bracing dose of that powerful love, that redeeming love. When Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, it's puzzling, jarring, even shocking--but it's not a punch line. The force of love courses through the breasts of the girl, as through human hearts suddenly reminded of their purpose.
Perhaps it's a flaw of mine that I look to literature for that kind of moral renewal. And there are a lot of writings I enjoy for their stylistic merit or pure entertainment value, outside of any spiritual resonance. But there's something about the active negation of that resonance in Nabokov--that willingness to utterly write off those who don't fit into his criteria, both in personal consideration and in his works, that makes me shudder in repulsion. Then any stylistic innovation feels like adding insult to injury; the ugliness of the statement is not made more palatable by its added fripperies, in fact the opposite. I guess I feel that literature, too, has an element of moral responsibility--one that it can evade but not utterly abdicate, or actively renege. I recognize that I might be part of a prudish minority on this, and lumped in with the poshliest of the poshlusty. But I think literature undermines its own relevance, already precarious, when it denies its own responsibilities.
Which is not to say I think that literature needs to be all sweetness and light--far from it. I will gladly climb down into the pit with Ivan Karamazov, and wallow in his importunate drunkenness. As long as I can stand with him and say to Aloshya,
"I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. "
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