"I Confess I Do Not Believe In Time": Exile and Temporality In Nabokov's Short Stories

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“I Confess I Do Not Believe In Time”

Exile and Temporality in Nabokov’s Short Stories

Merel Aalders (11753560)

Master Thesis UvA Comparative Literature First Reader: dr. B. Noordenbos

Second reader: dr. E.R.G. Metz June 2019

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In the middle of his one major autobiographical work Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov owns up to what the reader, up until this point, has already been highly suspicious of: “I confess I do not believe in time” (106). For Nabokov, a writer living in more or less voluntary political exile for a large part of his life, history is never a given. Travelling across borders a number of times during his life, nostalgia and an enquiry of temporality run continuously through his work. Nabokov’s project is therefore unique within both modernist and postmodernist strands. In this thesis, I will bring the two discourses on exile and on narrative temporality together on the basis of Nabokov’s autobiography and his short stories. For that, I will have to connect two different notions of exile: exile as displacement and exile as nostalgic condition. The first conception can be tracked through ‘distant reading’: a superficial, quantitative approach to movement across nations in Europe and America in the twentieth century. The second notion of exile is more intimate and refers to a strategy of survival resulting in artistic creation, which can be approached through ‘close reading’. Considering both, I want to outline Nabokov’s experience of exile as it contributes to the development of how we have come to consider temporality, both in art and in life.

Nabokov’s concern with the ungraspable nature of memory and the poetic power of nostalgia engender experimentation with narrative temporality and a reconfiguration of the experience of time. Another author with the experience of exile, Dubravka Ugrešić, articulates the place where exile and temporality meet as follows:

The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream. All at once, as in a dream, faces appear which he had forgotten, or perhaps had never met, places which he is undoubtedly seeing for the first time, but that he feels he knows from somewhere. The dream is a magnetic field which attracts images from the past, present and future (The

Museum of Unconditional Surrender 9).

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998) is a fictionalized autobiographical work which

traces the writer’s (traumatized) memory, only to find that there is no linear logic to it. According to Ugrešić, this dreamlike state of the experience of exile uncouples the exile from an ordinary sense of temporality, concerning past, present and future. Ugrešić has often referred to Nabokov’s writing in and on exile, as her own experiences correspond to his and their writing displays similarities in this respect. For both, the ‘uncoupling’ of an ordinary sense of temporality contributes to a rather abstract, personal sense of determination:

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4 The exile suddenly sees in reality faces, events and images, drawn by the magnetic field of the dream; suddenly it seems as though his biography was written long before it was to be fulfilled, that his exile is therefore not the result of external circumstances nor his choice, but a jumble of coordinates which fate had long ago sketched out for him. Caught up in this seductive and terrifying thought, the exile begins to decipher the signs, crosses and knots and all at once it seems as though he were beginning to read in it all a secret harmony, a round logic of symbols (9).

The experience of exile transcends causal notions of external circumstances and choice: being in a kind of purgatory between leaving and returning, the exile reads their environment without the logic of belonging to it, without having it fulfil any direct explanations in relation to the individual, let alone it being able to express their state of being. Similarly, Edward Said states that there are some positive things to say about the state of exile: “Seeing the entire world as a foreign land makes possible originality of vision” (191). In Nabokov’s writing, this restructuring of the personal experience according to a timeless, independent logic of symbolic matters, finds its expression in ingenious aesthetic articulations and experimental narrative structures.

Being part of a large movement of liberal intellectuals, both émigrés and exiles, that travelled through Europe and the US at the beginning of the twentieth century, Nabokov’s work is situated within the strands of this particular modernist tradition. However, his thought indicates the beginning of postmodernist considerations of temporality as well. In order to track the movement of Nabokov and contemporaries, I will look at Will Norman’s study

Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America (2016), and

Sara-Louise Cooper’s consideration of the relation between memory and mobility in Memory Across

Borders (2016). Both works are concerned with the crossing of borders, Norman mostly with

national ones; Cooper with linguistic borders and the borders of self and other as well. They both acknowledge the nation state, since, as Cooper puts it: “Postulating a borderless literary space ignores […] the unequal distribution of economic and political power in the present world” (6). I agree that, as attractive as a literary space without borders sounds, it would not be helpful when analysing exile in the twentieth century, for which the loss of a national home (albeit therefore also the gain of new, intercultural insights) is of the utmost importance.

There are two separate discourses on exile to be discerned. Scholarship on exile is concerned with either the theme of nostalgia as an intimate, autobiographical thing and the

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5 extent to which it is possible to transcend the nostalgic need to return home as creative salvation,

or with its function within globalization and theory on the displacement of persons. This last

approach is embraced by, among others, Said and Darko Suvin, according to whom globalization has to be viewed as an existing situation from which new ways of experiencing spring, the experience of exile being one of them. To Said and Suvin, displacement is a global phenomenon which cannot be accurately grasped by considering ‘representatives’ like Nabokov. The problem, for Said, is that travel is fundamentally unrepresentable. Yet it can also be argued, as Cooper points out, that such a view precisely contributes to the silencing it contests (8). In light of this, it is helpful not to think as much of representation, but rather of the expression of experience through structure and style. For analysing the way the experience of exile translates to aesthetics in literature, the very creative act of restructuring the experience based on memory, nostalgia and loss has to be taken into consideration as well.

Nabokov’s work is situated both within the modernist and the postmodernist tradition. I argue that Nabokov’s work is eccentric to the modernist tradition because of the persistent presence of an individual loss, but through that tendency he is precisely one of the writers starting to question temporality in postmodernist terms. The presence of personal memory and nostalgia, which play significant roles in Nabokov’s work, are also highly individual matters, and the original, experimental narrative structures he employs often go beyond the modernist project of tracking the mysteries of time, delivering him, to an extent, to postmodern concerns as well. I am looking for metaphor on a structural level in Nabokov’s work, which is more than a representation of exile on thematic level. Marina Grishakova’s work is useful in this respect. In “The Models of Time” (2012), she argues that the narrative constructions in Nabokov’s work configure circularity, spirality and rhythmicality instead of linearity and causality, and thereby provide models for postmodernist thought on temporality as well.

I am reading Nabokov dialectically, providing a literary history situated within the field of world literature. I am basing this approach on Carolyn Lesjak’s, as she outlines it in “Reading Dialectically” (2013), arguing that global spatial relations are a point to start from, instead of considering them an end to something. The idea of global spatial relations can be found in the work of Fredric Jameson. In The End of Temporality (2003), Jameson argues that postmodern artists and other subjects all face the same situation, in which it is no longer possible to view time and space separately. On the basis Lesjak’s and Jameson’s approach, as well as Grishakova’s, we can consider Paul Ricoeur’s thought, which follows the argument that narrative configuration consists of a reconfiguration of temporal experience. It concludes that narrative cannot fix the problem of determining time itself, but it is clear that the two go hand

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6 in hand. Next to his Transatlantic Aliens, Norman provides a work which considers temporality in Nabokov’s text on a more thematic level, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (2012), which occasionally relies on Ricoeur’s work as well. To me these are important starting points for thinking about narrative and temporality.

Jameson considers modernism to be an unfinished project of modernizations in which an obsession with time is dominant, whereas developments on the level of the global have made the focus spatial. For Lesjak, then, this is something to keep in mind, a situation to start from in order to keep close reading, and reading dialectically: to read space relationally. She considers this, and I agree, beneficial for envisioning concrete instead of abstract resolutions: rather than dwelling upon literary interpretations within a theoretical enclave, dialectical reading keeps in mind relationality within history, and acknowledges the importance of the lived experience, which can never be read on the surface. Reading Nabokov dialectically, then, opens up to the possibility to consider his experience of exile to relate to the larger cultural frame it responds to, including its inherent developments of temporality and spatiality. Nabokov’s work is considered primordially aesthetic (rather than, for instance, social), and therefore deserves a close reading rather than a surface one. This means considering the structure of narrative forms and their expressions in textual details, which I will do on the basis of Grishakova’s postclassical approach, considering metaphor as a model for textual interpretation and fictional world-making.

Analysing short stories has an advantage compared to the analysis of novels, since short stories are concentrated in meaning and provide the reader with an unambiguous overview. Nabokov’s novels can come across as autonomous constructions, but the short stories I have analysed display a significant amount of similar tendencies, which is why it makes sense to compare them. Unlike, for instance, Lolita, which can be analysed from so many angles that choosing one almost seems arbitrary, the short stories I chose are fit for an integral narratological approach. In the first part of my thesis, I will outline Nabokov’s life and thoughts on time according to his autobiography Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966); discuss his displacement in light of the larger movement of intellectuals who are crossing borders in the twentieth century; and introduce the concepts of memory and nostalgia in relation to his exile. I will base my argument about the need to bring together a close reading of aesthetic creation and a distant reading of displacement on Nabokov’s short stories as cultural objects. In the second part of my thesis, I will discuss the notion of exile as displacement in relation to narrative temporality; and close read ‘The Circle’ and ‘A Guide to Berlin’. In the third part I will bring this first notion of exile in conversation with the second one, which mainly circles

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7 around nostalgia; I will thereby look at ‘The Visit to the Museum’ as well and employ a narratological approach that is fitting for postmodernist writing; and discuss the implications of such an analysis for thinking about time.

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8 Part I: The Writer in Exile

Autobiography and the Concept of Time

Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory begins with a proposition: that “our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” (9). The starting point for telling the story of his life, then, is to establish first what a life is, and this immediately alludes to the question of time itself. An anecdote follows, about a young chronophobiac Nabokov supposedly once knew, who panicked when seeing home videos of his family right before his birth, unable to grasp the fact of his own inexistence. Contemplating the prelude to existence inevitably reminds one of its aftermath, death, engendering the verdict to memento mori, to know one’s place in between the eternities of darkness, not live life too fully and stop the imagination from running amok. But not for Nabokov, who then claims: “I rebel against this state of affairs” (9). His mind, he explains, has taken notice of glimpses of his personal life as they light up in the impersonal darkness on both sides of it, “only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits” (10). There are merely walls of time around a life, Nabokov argues, meaning time itself is no definite end of man. To tell a life, then, is best done by collecting and configuring the scattered structural aspects that make up themes, independent from the prison of time, like the matches of his grandfather Nabokov recalls vividly, as they turn up in a number of different memories and anecdotes. He writes: “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography” (16). But first, we need to know what this life looks like.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is born in St. Petersburg in 1899 as the first child of what will eventually be five, in a cultured family with a liberal political orientation. His childhood mostly takes place at the country estate Vyra, which is rather comfortable, and his upbringing is fairly disciplined and intellectually inclined. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, becomes the head of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the first Duma, the advisory assembly introduced by tsar Nicholas II, in 1905. After the Duma is dissolved, Nabokov’s father is sentenced for inciting civil disobedience, and goes to prison for three months. In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution starts, the provisional government is overthrown, tsar Nicholas II is abdicated, and the Nabokov family flees from St. Petersburg to the Crimea, which has become an independent republic by then. They settle in the South Crimea, or

Crimean Riviera, where his father continues to fulfil an important political role. In 1918, the

tsar and his family are assassinated. In 1919, the Nabokovs officially go into exile. In 1920, Nabokov’s father sets up a liberal émigré newspaper called Rul’ (The Rudder), which has

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pro-9 western and democratic aspirations. In 1922, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov is assassinated (Speak, Memory xxiv).

From 1919 until 1922, Nabokov studies at Cambridge, but then settles in Berlin. There, in 1923, he meets his future wife Véra Evseevna Slonim at an emigré charity ball and they get married two years later. Véra becomes his best personal editor, translator, typist and critic, remaining so until his death. In the early twenties, Berlin has become the capital of Russian emigration: Russian emigrés and exiles form a community on their own. Both Nabokov and Véra publish pieces in the journal Rul’, Nabokov mostly poetry (under the pseudonym V. Sirin which he later gives up); Véra translations from English. Later, around 1925, when Lenin has passed and Stalin is about to rise to absolute power in Russia, Paris becomes the capital of Russian emigration. Nabokov and his wife stay in Berlin, however, until 1937, and only move to Paris for a little while in 1938: Nabokov first, Véra following with their little son Dmitri, by then three years old. In 1940, the couple escapes France and moves to New York, which is where Nabokov starts writing in English (xxxii).

In New York, Nabokov teaches at Wellesley and later at Cornell, until, in 1959, the success of Lolita (1955) makes him financially independent and he moves to Europe to settle in Switzerland. He stays there until his death in 1977. Since leaving Vyra, Nabokov spends a great deal of his life writing from hotel rooms and university lodgings, interrupting his work from time to time to prepare and deliver lectures, attend social gatherings or look for undiscovered types of butterflies. His life is a relatively comfortable one with little concern for household activities, including even making his own coffee. These are Véra’s concerns, as she makes sure to provide the writer with everything he needs to maintain his public persona. Nabokov and Véra are not always in the same place uninterruptedly, yet they depend a great deal on each other’s existence, in lieu of relying on any home country (Boyd xxii).

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov discusses his ideas on time in light of the experiences of personal life: his discovery as well as his rejection of time are displayed as essential to the more or less universal unveilings of life in general. At the age of four, Nabokov tells us, he asks for his age and the age of his parents, which make him aware of the concept of time: “Thus, when the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me. […] I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time” (11). By discovering the infinity of time, he immediately also discovers his own finitude: “Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison” (10). For Nabokov, this discovery of time is also the birth of his consciousness: “Indeed, from my present

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10 ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life” (11). Time, for Nabokov, is a condition for conscious experience – yet tracking its ambiguous movements will appear to be a continuous project throughout his literary fiction.

A little later, Nabokov states a confession, namely that “I do not believe in time” (106). Rather, he views his life as something in the form of Hegelian dialectics, shaped like a spiral: “A coloured spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899 – 19) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany and France (1919 – 40) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940 – 60) forms a synthesis – and a new thesis” (215). Nabokov considers these dialectical movements to express “merely the essential spirality of all things in their relationship to time. Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series” (215). Behind these spiralling movements, then, something spiritual looms, a sort of timelessness he articulates in a particularly poetic manner: “It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humouring a lucky mortal” (106). In Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes this experience of timelessness as a feeling of ecstasy, a feeling he says to have sometimes experienced when standing among rare butterflies in their natural habitat.

These aesthetic considerations of time in Nabokov’s autobiography are proof of a need to move beyond its linear conception and to experiment with other forms. Scholars have approached Nabokov’s enquiry of time from different angles. What I will show is that Nabokov’s nonconventional considerations of time are fundamentally creative, for instance, but one can also first consider the anxiety that preludes it. Martin Hägglund, in his Dying for Time (2012), considers Nabokov’s relationship with time to have the characteristics of what he calls

chronophobia. He writes: “The main symptom of chronophobia is an apprehension of the

imminent risk of loss and a concomitant desire to imprint the memory of what happens” (82). The need to document memory is based on a fear of forgetting, which, in turn, is based on a fear of the slippery nature of time in general. But for Nabokov, memory is more than a neurological faculty: it is ultimately poetic. According to Leona Toker, another prominent scholar on Nabokov’s work, this can be traced back to Nabokov’s reading of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who considers memory to be somewhat of a bridge or formula between the physical and the spiritual. According to Toker, Nabokov enjoys the idea of memory as “highly poetic but not necessarily as definitive” (8). Nabokov’s quest for transcendence into the spiritual

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11 can be considered Romantic, but according to Toker, Nabokov does not entirely believe this transcendence to be possible. She places Nabokov’s quest for poetic memory within the thematic realm of mystery, and mysteries are generally solved by completing puzzles and tracking down patterns. These puzzles and patterns are prominent features of the narrative structures of Nabokov’s work, but “the patterns that he creates are usually imperfect” (10). The Romantic features of his narratives, then, display a complexity fitting to modernist thought, where the sensory experience of the subject is emphasized.

In a more recent work, Insomniac Dreams (2018), Grennady Barabtarlo analyses the fascination with English philosopher John Dunne (1875 – 1949) Nabokov develops later in life. Dunne’s theory that different streams of time can simultaneously run in different directions prompts Nabokov to keep a log of his dreams for several months, to see if they can predict the future (whether or not they do remains a matter of interpretation). Barabtarlo writes: “Dunne straddles a curiously uncomfortable ridge, clear of both physics and metaphysics” (8). For Dunne, the subjective observer is important, and “physics is not interested in sensory perceptions, including the sense of time” (8). Dunne and Nabokov are. “On the other hand, Dunne states in the introduction that his theory is decidedly free of mysticism, clairvoyance, or prophecy” (8). It is important for Dunne, then, that his explanations remain within the restrains of the natural sciences. Yet time, for Dunne, is constructed out of different layers that we perceive from our subjective, sensory centre, layers “ever unfolding before the mind of an observer into a receding mental vista: time that times the passage of Time, measures it to infinity” (15). When dreaming, we enter a realm of timelessness, where we can have, according to Dunne, memories of both past and future (16). For Nabokov, this is of course a very attractive idea.

Displacement for the Transatlantic Intellectual

Memory is personal, and, in Nabokov’s case, related to his ideas about time. But there is also a collective notion of memory involved here, since Nabokov’s move to America can be situated within what Will Norman indicates as the great flight of culture. This term is dubbed by Henry Luce, and it refers to a wave of intellectual European migrants that went to America and carried one of the largest qualitative (rather than quantitative) movements of culture across continents (Transatlantic Aliens 1). Norman analyses this move on the basis of questions that were already asked during this time, around the early forties, namely whether the confrontation of differences between the American and European cultures could be resolved dialectically and whether that could lead to some form of hybridization. Norman argues in favour of a dialectical approach,

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12 and states that “the experience of displacement brought about in in a range of transatlantic figures [such as Nabokov] a complex engagement with the emergence of a fully fledged mass culture in the US, which in several cases had a lasting effect on postwar art and literature” (2). The effects of the merge of European and American modernism in the lives of these transatlantic figures can be analysed in their aesthetic and intellectual practices. For Norman, mass culture (Fordism, Hollywood, Coca-Cola) is an important source for the personal experience as well as a provider of aesthetic and affective charges. In Lolita, for instance, Nabokov’s portrayal of the American landscape is very cynical: a chain of images of consumerism and cultural deterioration, and the character of the ‘superficial American’ is exploited through many figures, including mother Haze.

But from a certain moment on, Nabokov identifies as an American author. In a 1962 interview he says to feel intellectually at home in America, and to consider it a second home in the true sense of the word (154). Some intellectuals, like the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, criticize Nabokov for not engaging with any particular society: to not conform to any but therefore also not revolt against any. A reply to that would be that for Nabokov, aesthetic criteria are universal rather than based on nationalism, regionalism or provincialism. In this sense, the American landscape that he observes so finely is interchangeable with a European or Russian one to the extent that the aesthetic charges abstracted from them are of the same quality. Norman writes: “The division of culture for Nabokov […] was a question of hierarchical stratification by universally applicable aesthetic criteria” (155). Nabokov’s transatlantic experience of exile provides him with access to a large and rich cultural field that keeps broadening as long as the dialectical relationship between modernist cultures is saturated. In the same way, his experience as part of a collective movement interacts with the personal experience of time. I will come back to these observations in relation to the work of Ursula K. Heise.

Nabokov’s movement across cultures is all but unproblematic. A movement across cultures implies a movement across languages as well, the implications of which affect one’s sense of identity. Nabokov’s most acclaimed novels, including Lolita and Pale Fire (1962), are English-written, as are some of his most intriguing short stories, like Signs and Symbols (1948). The English-written works can also be considered most craftily stylized. As Svetlana Boym remarks in The Future of Nostalgia (2001): “Bilingual consciousness is not a sum of two languages, but a different state of mind altogether; often the bilingual writers reflect on the foreignness of all language” (257). Nabokov’s gift for language allows him to seamlessly weave words that appear to belong in the depths of the most obscure dictionaries right into otherwise

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13 relatable and compelling narratives, without overabundance. Appropriating a new language appears to be a second nature to him – his English vocabulary eventually seems even richer than his Russian. However, from a letter to his wife Véra from 1942 it becomes clear that writing in a different language provokes a deep sense of nostalgia as well:

On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me – a passionate desire to write – and to write in Russian. And yet I can’t. I don’t think anyone who has never experienced this feeling can really understand its torment, its tragedy. In this sense the English language is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e. busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself don’t fully register the whole grief and bitterness of my situation (Letters to Véra 482).

In this condition of exile, the new language, however skilfully mastered and aesthetically employed, still feels like a surrogate for something more idiosyncratic. What does not help is that other Russian writers consider Nabokov’s move from the Russian language to English a form of treason. Nabokov’s nostalgia manifests itself not only in a hunkering after Russia, but in a hunkering after aesthetic expression in its language as well. Since this appears to be unattainable, the particularities of exile experience need to find expression otherwise.

Memory and Nostalgia

There are two dominant discourses on exile. First of all, the experience of exile is often approached from the quantitative ‘distant reading’ point of view of the intellectual movement that entered the United States in the forties, which is concerned with displacement and globalization. Influential authors like Suvin and Said can be considered leading in this respect. On the other hand, one can qualitatively ‘close read’ texts from exiled writers with a focus on nostalgia and its transcendence through aesthetic creation, by looking closely at structure and meaning. In order to fully grasp the relationship between Nabokov’s experience of exile and time, however, I argue that these two approaches to exile have to be brought together. A key concept here is memory, but its definition is rather broad. It can pertain to both the individual and the national, history and fiction, rootedness and mobility, and all kinds of interactions between those. The interaction between these concepts connects the two interpretations of exile, creating new angles from which to approach them. Thinking about nostalgia in individual memory in relation to the mobility between nations, for instance, can help situate questions of temporality, and subsequently its relation to narrative structure.

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14 One of the difficulties when speaking of memory is the question of representation: can the work of an individual, especially one of high aesthetic qualities, represent what really happens to certain groups of people at a certain time and place? Said, whose theoretical orientation is mainly focussed on globalization and migration, thinks it cannot, for thinking of one experience of exile as representative of all kinds of others is a form of silencing those others. According to Said, modern Western culture is for a large part the work of exiles, émigrés and refugees, but, he asks: “If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture?” (191). According to him, this can only happen through literary or artistic expression, not through representation. He argues that “only travel as freedom can be expressed through literary forms and that travel as loss is by definition unrepresentable” (Cooper 8). This is why, when reading Nabokov in relation to memory, it is helpful to think about expression rather than representation. There is a different reading at stake when considering representation to be a rather limited mode of thinking: a reading that cannot take linear temporality as a given.

The other key concept is nostalgia. Nostalgia expresses itself as a function of memory in Nabokov’s work. Memory, for Nabokov, is not neutral, it is always inflicted with nostalgic longing and aestheticized as if the memory of a person, place or event is more important than the thing itself. But according to Cooper, memory for Nabokov also means “a measure of self-criticism and questioning of his own ready-made images of the past” (116). Memory is reflection, but thereby also self-reflection, creating a constant inner dialogue. My argument is that for a large part, this is due to its nostalgia, a painful longing so hard to overcome that new modes of thinking need to be explored – which for the writer means new modes of writing.

In order to fully grasp the concept of nostalgia, I will consider the work of Svetlana Boym: The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Thinking about nostalgia makes one nostalgic oneself, she writes, and one should not dwell on it for too long. Having said that, she provides the reader with a profound study of the concept. She describes nostalgia as follows:

Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is double exposure, or a superimposition of two images – of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface (xiii-xiv).

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15 Nabokov can definitely be considered to have a romance with his own fantasy. The colourful (the range of tones and shades of colours in his vocabulary is really enormously wide), sensitive and ultimately nostalgic descriptions of childhood images in his autobiography as well as the aesthetic profundity of his fiction provide worlds that read as if one is not meant to leave them, as if nothing outside of the words is worth going back to. But nostalgia goes beyond the psychology of the individual, because it pertains to more than a specific place where one once lived: it is a rebellion against the modern idea of time as a historical progress in general. This is what makes it an essential contributor to new ideas of space and time, which divide the local from the universal (xvi). It is prospective as well as retrospective: it projects its historical emotion onto the future as well. Boym writes: “Nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (xvi). Nostalgia, she argues, is a feature of global culture, but one that demands a different currency than money and popular culture, for it “speaks in puzzles and riddles” (xvii).

Nostalgia in Nabokov’s work relates to the home as well as the native language, and the relationship it forms between the individual and the national can be tracked on the basis of his ideas about and employment of (narrative) time. Language and belonging are intricately tied, as Cooper observes in Memory Across Borders (2016): “When language becomes problematic, so does the question of memory and belonging to a national literary tradition” (5). Cooper’s work follows the border-crossing activities of a few (post)modern writers, one of them being Nabokov, and analyses the ways in which memory functions in their fictional work. Memory crosses the literary and literate borders in the works of these authors, rendering them to create their own personal memorials to the language and culture of their homes. Whereas Boym speaks of a double exposure of images that combines home and abroad, past and present and dream and everyday life, Cooper visualizes a site of creation where spatially distant histories come together inside memory. The border-crossing memories, Cooper writes, “sit uncomfortably within the national and the local. How to read them?” (5). Interacting with the literary conversations the fictional texts set up themselves, Cooper hopes to provide an answer to the question on how to read them today. Part of her attempt circles around the structuring of temporality, which arises out of a border-crossing experience that is initially difficult to place within existing discourses.

Cooper’s work points towards a field that should be explored further, but her analysis remains very much on the surface. She considers displacement to be metaphorical in literature, something I find limiting: metaphorical language represents more than it expresses, whereas I

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16 am interested in the expression of nostalgia relating to exile, looking beyond metaphor and into the structure of narrative forms. Cooper looks, for instance, at the kinds of figures that are frequently used in Nabokov’s fiction, such as ‘miniatures’ and ‘the wounded body’. As Nabokov introduces miniature versions of something that represents Russia like a toy in a bottle, Coopers sees this as attempts to preserve the past. I think this approach is very interpretative and therefore a bit fragile, and although I find it helpful and interesting how she foregrounds the function of memory in the literary texts of border-crossing intellectuals, I want to look at how the story is told and the fictional world-making this implies, rather than looking at the recognizable figures that are produced. Therefore I will have to outline narrative temporality first. Boym’s conception of nostalgia complies with Nabokov’s focus on personal memory, but the cultural paradigm this focus interacts with is discussed in Cooper’s and Norman’s work. Both approaches, I argue, come together in the employment of narrative temporality in Nabokov’s work. In the next part of my thesis, I will start to consider the first conception of exile, that of exile as displacement, in relation to Nabokov’s short stories.

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17 Part II: Exile as Displacement and Narrative Temporality

Narrative Temporality

In this part of my thesis, I want to explore the structure of narrative temporality in Nabokov’s short stories based on the conception of exile as displacement. Globalization and displacement are one of the main features of a specific discourse on exile. Darko Suvin defines it as follows in ‘Displaced Persons’ (2005): “The precondition for talking about this category [displacement] is the existence of people who grow up and are acculturated in one national society, with its

mores, language, sights, sounds and all other treasures of youthful experience, and who mote

to live in another country without certitude of return” (111). Suvin distinguishes exiles from émigrés, expatriates and refugees, but acknowledges that the incompatibility of discourses on these different groups should be resolved. Still: the political and ideological situation of the exile is specific, and it determines for a large part their ‘voice’ in the new, alien country. For Suvin, however, displacement in literature is mainly metaphorical and a widespread condition of modernism, whereas I want to move beyond this definition and look at the structure of narrative temporality rather than considering just metaphor, and consider the postmodernist implications of displacement as well.

In order to connect displacement and narrative temporality, I will first outline the coexistence of narrativity and temporality and indicate why their coexistence matters. Then, I will consider narrative temporality in relation to the cultural context of modernism and postmodernism. In order to situate Nabokov as a high modernist and ‘ahead of his time’ (an eccentric modernist displaying signs of postmodernism) I will look at some of his short stories and consider the expression of exile in it a cultural phenomenon: the displacement of people. This part of my thesis prepares for the third part, in which I will relate the first conception of exile to the second one that is more concerned with nostalgia and its transcendence.

The structure of temporality in literary fiction is tied up with the experience time, of the subject as well as in a paradigmatic sense (a fundamental, all-encompassing shift in the conception of temporality in times of globalization that is based on but has implications far beyond the subjective experience). If we speak of the modernist subject, for instance, we can say that in general, they discover that time slips from their fingers and recovering in all kinds of ways is a fundamental literary project. Through the subconscious, they envision themselves to have access (at least partially) to latent containers of meaning that are able to restore a sense of loss. Postmodernism, on the other hand, involves a whole new relationship with time. Time becomes less associated with linearity and causality for the postmodern subject, and more with

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18 spatiality instead. Postmodernist subjects have a weakened sense of causality and a stronger inclination towards contingency. My argument is that the movement across nations, both as a global phenomenon and as the emergence of a new, specific consciousness within the individual subject, contributes to the development of postmodernism. As globalization becomes the new situation, a different sense of temporality emerges: a sense of time with an emphasis on the ‘now’, in which connections are available and channels are open, and movement is a constant rather than an indication of causality. We can see this development becoming manifest when the state of exile starts demanding a voice.

Narrative structures of literary fiction are the object of my analysis. In order to connect the experience of the subject to narrative temporality, I will use Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative temporality and Ursula K. Heise’s Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative and

Postmodernism (1997) as point of departure. Ricoeur’s first argument (and mine) is that

narrativity and temporality are closely related. He writes: “Indeed, I take temporality to be that structure of existence that reaches language in narrativity and narrativity to be the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent. Their relationship is therefore reciprocal” (“Narrative Time” 169). Ricoeur argues that phenomenological enquiry of time has laid bare an incommensurability between lived time and cosmic time. There is a third time, then, which provides a sort of bridge between the two: historical time. This historical time is, of course, narrative time as well: telling a story requires history – a way of incapsulating the sequence of events and how they relate to each other (Time and Narrative 99). But we need narrativity to be able to create an understanding of temporality as well: without a way of encapsulating it, it escapes our grip (241). The most relevant narrative structure to analyse, then, is the plot. Ricoeur writes: “By plot I mean the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story” (“Narrative Time” 171).

The plot is what makes events into a story. However, it is much more complex than just indicative of linearity. There is a notion of within-time-ness: that the events happen inside of time. When the subject is following a story, it is inside this time as well, but it is more complicated: there is a radical sense of contingency at stake. Ricoeur writes: “There is no story if our attention is not moved along by a thousand contingencies. This is why a story has to be followed to its conclusion. So rather than being predictable, a conclusion must be acceptable” (175). In order for a conclusion to be acceptable, then, there have to be other possibilities as well. The conception of temporality that accompanies this is already much more spatial.

I am reading Nabokov dialectically, meaning I am considering the relation between the subjective and the circumstantial mutually productive. Ricoeur considers a reciprocal

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19 relationship between the subject and history as well: the subject makes history, but is affected by historical circumstances too. At the heart of this question is the apparent antinomy between the continuity and discontinuity of history. On the one hand, we expect our memory to be a continuous, truthful source of reliance, but on the other, the movement of history has proved time and again to exist as a constant follow-up of ruptures. The solution to this supposed antinomy, Ricoeur argues, is to accept the subjective consciousness as something that is non-transparent to itself, that is not the master of meaning (Time and Narrative 219). Instead, the relationship between subject and environment is dialectical: both influence the other. The arguments that Heise make are in line with these observations, yet they are concerned more specifically with modernism and postmodernism: the two periods in between which Nabokov’s work can be situated.

Temporality constitutes as much a concern for postmodernism, both in theory and in art, as it does for modernism. However, the consequences of this particular concern are different. In postmodern culture, a shift in emphasis from time to space is noticeable. This is accompanied by a weakening of historical consciousness, and Heise considers the social and political implications thereof. In theories of high modernism, the interlacing of memory and expectation in the individual experience of time can be analysed, but in postmodern culture, temporality’s interaction with space makes the subject matter more complicated. Heise writes about her work: “Chronoschisms aims at showing the relationship between […] innovative narrative structures and a broader transformation in the Western culture of time that has taken place since the 1960s and involves changes in science, technology, and socio-economic structures as well as in aesthetic practices” (5).

On the basis on a few postmodern novels, Heise analyses the way temporality functions in narrative structures, and subsequently what we can say about the experience of time. She considers the loss of historical time in the experience of the subject to be connected to a renewed spatial understanding of things, which results in chronoschisms: different temporalities that are able to exist simultaneously. In literature this can mean contradictory temporal structures of different storylines, such as an alternation between a linear and a cyclical plot. To overcome irreconcilability, it is important to hold both causality and contingency in a balanced relation to each other: there is no need to throw any notion of cause and effect overboard, but one must also not try to fight the emergence of an understanding of the dispersion of multiple possible effects. Chronoschisms starts from the consideration of narrative temporality based on literary fiction, but ultimately touches upon the actual experience of time within Western culture as it tries to overcome a sense of temporal shrinkage. This means that we are losing an understanding

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20 of past, present and future as the dominant narrative, knowing things we experience now are based on what happened in the past – our understanding ‘shrinks’ this way. Yet we also gain new ways of understanding: a sense of connectivity stretched out spatially, on which we increasingly consider what we experience to be based on, rather than on a fixed, almost institutional sense of ‘the past’.

Chronoschisms distils two revolutions of our experience of time, the first one being

approximately around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, where dramatical technological changes in transport and communication radically altered this experience. The second revolution is situated in high modernism, which started roughly around the end of the second world war. The second revolution has doubled in intensity. We experience time as more fragmented, and moving at different speeds. This makes it harder for us to get a grip on past, present and future. Where the modernist project was to transcend time, the postmodernist project is more submissive to it, and its aspirations are more modest, and “descriptive” (269). The postmodernist goes beyond the modernist, in the sense that they register time as consisting of irreparable chronoschisms: the postmodernist is more accepting of chronological heterogeneity. Carter writes, for instance: “Time is growing less and less amenable to narrativity. It is mimicking space” (269). With her analysis of European and American avant-garde writers situated in between the first and the second time-revolutions, Heise points out the many possibilities of the retrograde of modern time.

Heise considers the fact that we can speak of a loss in our relationship to time. When our temporal experience shrinks to a narrow sort of ‘now’, consisting of only the present, the notion of causality loses its meaning (209). But this temporal shrinking also gives way to spatial world-making. As I pointed out: in literary fiction there is an increasing experimentation with different storylines, as long as they are balanced. But temporal experimentation in literary fiction also means that a quest for meaning is complicated: rather than trying to answer questions, postmodern narratives usually provide more and more information concerning the central question of the plot, without answering it (211). The attempt to answer a question only results in more questions, there is an infinite database of information available, and all that matters is how it connects, which comes down to an incalculable amount of possibilities. Reading the world in this way is made possible by the loss of the experience of linear temporality and the gain of spatial consciousness. There is a displacement of effects, Heise writes, rather than a movement from cause to effect (248). Overcoming this displacement, and the chronoschisms it embodies, can be done by combining contingency and causation without privileging one over the other, “so that both continuities and ruptures are assigned crucial roles

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21 in the texture of time” (263). I consider Nabokov to be one of the writers ahead of his time when it comes to overcoming the simultaneous existence of temporalities, exceeding the modernist project and contributing to a more spatial consciousness.

Displacement: Two Short Stories

Nabokov’s short story ‘A Guide to Berlin’ (1925) consists of five short sections in which the narrator describes elements of Berlin he has experienced during his days of visiting the city, in order for his companion, who he meets up with, to do the same. Nabokov is living in Berlin when ‘A Guide to Berlin’ is published, but the extent to which the story is autobiographical is irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is its expression of displacement, and how its narrative structure gives expression to a new kind of experience of temporality and spatiality. In the early twenties, Berlin is the capital of Russian exile, which means it is full of liberal Russians who have escaped the socialist regime or are banned for other political reasons. The narrator of ‘A Guide to Berlin’ is in a similar state: it is obvious that he is not a tourist, but also not an émigré getting settled – instead, he is wandering around the city, seeing everything from a rather narrow point of view, focussing on aspects of this city without their contextual notion of purpose. As Heise remarks: “When the temporal experience of the individual restricts itself to an increasingly narrow present, causal connections, which are define through time, lose their meaning and can only be perceived as mere effects, or ‘signs and symptoms’” (209). This contingency of multiple effects is expressed through the random description of things seen in Berlin.

‘A Guide to Berlin’ was originally written in Russian. It lists five aspects of the city, the last aspect (the pub) being the beginning of the introduction as well, weaving the beginning and the end of the story into each other. It starts with extremely specific, seemingly marginal aspects of the city, that are connected with other, equally marginal ones. In a slightly ironic tone of voice, the narrator presents the things discussed as “important matters” (175). He sits down in a pub with his companion, but instead of mapping typical Berlin tourist attractions or historical sites one would want to see, he starts describing certain objects and situations he has encountered in Berlin so far. They are discussed from a highly subjective viewpoint, as though his interpretations of them are more important than the actual things themselves. First, there are

the pipes, supposedly sewer pipes, that have yet to be lowered into the ground. An inhabitant

of Berlin would barely notice these pipes as they are lying on the street, since they do not have any significance on their own – they are supposed to dissolve into the infrastructure of the city to fulfil their duty and not be seen again. One would not think about them, but merely see them

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22 as means to an end. But from the narrator’s point of view they are worth dwelling upon: they signify something more.

Secondly, the narrator describes his experience of riding a typical Berlin streetcar, drawing attention to its speed and the agility of the conductor. The narrator is reminded of the horse drawn trams in St. Petersburg, and falls into a nostalgic musing on the fact that this streetcar, too, will vanish and eventually become history. He fantasizes that another writer, situated in the twenties of the twenty-first century (a hundred years later), would come upon a model of this streetcar in a museum, and would try to describe the streetcar and the old Berlin streets in all their details. Nabokov writes: “I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right” (177). After that, the narrator analyses different kinds of work and then the zoo, which he compares to the first, original home of man: “Every large city has its own, man-made Eden on earth” (178). The fifth part is a description of the pub he is sitting in, and his companion, whom he is describing the guide to. “‘That’s a very poor guide,’ my companion says glumly. ‘Who cares about how you took a streetcar and went to the Berlin Aquarium?’” (179). But the narrator is already distracted by other things: a child is watching him, and he imagines himself being part of the memory of this child, in the very far future.

The story is made up out of elements that hang together through the narrator’s need to capture them in their essence, rather atomically, as though they do not belong to the larger logic of city life. This, then, becomes the structure of the story: what ties the elements together is the narrator’s subjective experience of them, and a point of view that is anxiously concerned with preservation through memory, much like the chronophobia Hägglund distinguishes in Nabokov’s own voice. The present is already envisioned as a past, and the future as a time in which this past will be present. This sentiment acquires extra weight by the circularity (or

spirality) through which the narrative is structured: it starts with the narrator sitting down in the

pub with his companion to enlighten this person about all the important things to visit, the last subject being the pub itself, and ends with the companion telling the narrator that the guide he provides is a bad one, the words of this companion belonging to the description of the pub inside the guide itself. The pub-scene can be considered as a synthesis of the narrator’s recollections and his later descriptions of them, as well as a new thesis. As will be evident by now, it is quite difficult to discern the aspect of displacement from the aspect of nostalgia. The postmodernist development Heise describes, in which the temporal experience is shrinking to a present and

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23 time is considered fragmented, moving at different speeds at the same time, is inseparable from the experience of displacement in Nabokov’s work. The fact that the experience of time becomes more spatial and therefore creates room for new, independent structures of contingent effects implies, in Nabokov’s case, the nostalgic notion of projecting lost times onto present spaces. In the third part of my thesis, I will return to this issue.

As I pointed out when discussing Ricoeur: temporal enquiry like that of Nabokov lays bare an incommensurability between lived time and cosmic time. Historical or narrative temporality provides a gap between the two. Moreover, as I follow Heise to elaborate on this further: Nabokov is one of the writers that experiment with different narrative temporalities being brought into a balanced relationship with each other. This differs significantly from the structuralist account. The structuralist notion of focalisation discerns the ‘focalised object’ and the ‘focalizer’, the first one being the object-world of what is presented to the reader, the latter being the one showing us this world (Herman and Vervaeck 75). Having only one focalizer can make the reader feel that this one is unreliable, and to an extent, we do feel so when reading Nabokov (an extreme example of this being Lolita’s Humbert Humbert), but by being such an enchanting storyteller, he has us suspense our disbelief. In ‘A Guide to Berlin’, there is only one focalisation: that of the narrator. According to the structuralist approach, narrator and focalizer should be separated strictly, but in Nabokov’s fiction, this becomes a difficult task, that does not necessarily provide the best insight in his texts. There is an external as well as an internal focalisation, but they flow over into each other: an external focalizer is outside of the story and has temporal overview, and an internal focalizer takes part in the events (76). In ‘A Guide to Berlin’ and in the other stories, as we will see, these two modes are inseparable, precisely because Nabokov’s narrators want to be outside of time, they want to grasp it, understand it, transcend their position ‘in’ it. These kinds of experimentation with temporality, then, cannot be fully analysed through a classical narratological approach. I will return to this issue in part III.

In ‘The Circle’ (1934), written about nine years later, Nabokov starts implementing the typical, timeless puzzles and patterns idiosyncratic to his later fictional works, especially the ones frequently regarded as distinctly postmodern, like Lolita and Pale Fire (1962). The narrative structure of ‘The Circle’ has significant aspects in common with ‘A Guide to Berlin’, but it is focussed on the social realm instead. ‘The Circle’ describes Innokentiy’s recollections of his youth, when he was living near the estate of the enchanting Tanya. He falls in love with her and they enjoy a brief romance, but then Tanya moves away to the Crimea. Many years later, Innokentiy meets her and her mother again. When he notices how easily Tanya and her

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24 mother talk about the past and Tanya’s brother, who lives in Berlin, Innokentiy is overwhelmed by an epiphany: “Suddenly Innokentiy grasped a wonderful fact: nothing is lost, nothing whatever; memory accumulates treasures, stored-up secrets grow in darkness and dust, and one day a transient visitor at a lending library wants a book that has not once been asked for in twenty-two years” (439-40). Innokentiy understands all at once (maybe even ecstatically) that memory preserves all that otherwise slips away, that it keeps its treasures hidden somewhere, when everything around us appears to have changed.

The realization that nothing is lost is again enforced by the structure of the story itself, that starts with “In the second place” (429) and ends with “In the first” (440). Again, this last synthesis can be read as a new thesis: the story ends with the fact that in the first place, “Tanya had remained as enchanting and as invulnerable as she had been in the past” (440). This thought comes to Innokentiy in the café he describes sitting in at the beginning of the story: the end weaves perfectly into the beginning – yet it also anticipates newness. Moreover, the story is interlaced with circular vocabulary and images: when reading closely, one can see that, throughout the story, Nabokov skilfully implants the image of the circle in our minds. During one of the fishing trips Innokentiy recalls, for instance, rain covers the water “with mutually intersecting widening circles” (433), and later, when asleep, dream images “carry him out of the sleep circle” (433). Patterns like these remain indeed unfinished, there is no closed off conclusion indicating what Nabokov wants us to think or know.

The temporality of this story is fragmented in the sense that there are three temporalities to be discerned: the past, the present, and also the narrative temporality Ricoeur describes as historical time, the time belonging to the narrator of the story. The structuralist approach to the time of the narrator would here be discerned into internal and external focalisation, but again: these can hardly be separated. An external narrator could tell us about what happened in the first place, and then in the second, for instance, but this sequence has already been tempered with, and by the time we return to the “in the first place”, the focalisation has already become internal. The historical time here contests linearity and causality. Like ‘A Guide to Berlin’, it consists of a circular movement that weaves the beginning of the story into the end of it, but it is also much more reliant on contingency, aspires to lay bare a structure of possible effects, and circles around a central question without answering it (the question of causality). The events are projected into a space in which Innokentiy could, or could not have encountered Tanya and her mother again (rather than a chain of cause and effect). The contingency of the situation is just as important as its causality: the fact that Innokentiy does meet them again inspires him to realize that if he had not, nothing would have been lost either. A visitor could ask for a dusty

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25 old book in a library, but they could also not, and this would not have changed anything about the book itself: whether or not we suppose something to have happened does not determine its value. This thought is characteristic of postmodernism, and it is hard to imagine it being able to be expressed just as weightily without the initial notion of displacement (since it makes one doubt a teleological structure of life), a sentiment recognizable within the larger movement of border-crossing intellectuals of Nabokov’s age.

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26 Part III: Exile as Nostalgic Condition

Nostalgia and Creativity

In this part of my thesis, I will look at the role that nostalgic longing, and the need to transcend it, play in the experience of exile, and how this translates to artistic creation. In the previous part of my thesis, I have looked at narrative temporality and displacement. Here, I want to connect displacement to the more intimate notion of nostalgia and overcoming it as part of a strategy of survival in a strange world. My argument will follow Boym’s analysis of Nabokov as an off-modernist, who possesses the kind of nostalgia that creates ‘doubles’, and reflect on the expressions of world-making in his short stories through the postclassical narratological accounts of Grishakova. Lastly, I will consider Norman’s dialectical approach, to connect the intimate nature of nostalgia to the larger cultural developments it interacts with through the literary text.

In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym considers the concept of nostalgia. The word

nostalgia is derived from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algia, which Boym defines as

longing, although more generally it also means pain. Boym writes:

When we are home, we don’t need to talk about it. […] To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia (251).

To try and speak of a longing for home through a language that does not correspond with that home is, according to Boym, disheartening. Why even bother? Longing for home is an intimate thing, which means that it is very personal, yet the word ‘intimacy’ also has a communicative connotation. Boym differentiates two ways to try and communicate nostalgic feelings: restorative and reflective. The restorative nostalgic wants to rebuild the home and relive the feeling of being home, uncompromised. But “reflective nostalgics see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts” (251). Nabokov’s work displays signs of both, but leans more towards the latter.

When creating doubles, the writer imitates images of his past. Nabokov, like many writers and other exiles, masters the art of intimation, by “speaking about the most personal and intimate pain and pleasure through a ‘cryptic disguise’. Playing the game of hide-and-seek with memories and hopes” (252). His experience reflects that of many. Boym observes: “In the late

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27 twentieth century, millions of people find themselves displaced from their birthplace, living in voluntary or involuntary exile” (252). The intimacy of their experience is taking place against a foreign stage set, and this dissonance engenders the need for creation. Many exiles therefore become artists of their lives, she argues, remaking their sense of home, actual artistic practice being a natural extension of this. They create new worlds around them, bringing new customs and traditions to their secondary homelands. Boym argues that in contemporary American psychology, one is encouraged not to be afraid of intimacy and thereby always “say ‘what you mean’, without irony or doublethink” (252). For exiles and immigrants, this is not an attractive idea. Since they are surrounded by alien expressions of culture and language, their innermost selves are better communicated indirectly.

Nabokov can be classified as an example of ‘off-modernists’: eccentric modernists, often exiles or émigrés, who are concerned with projects divergent from the mainstream. Other examples of off-modernists are Joseph Brodsky (who writes, for instance, that for the writer, the only patriotism is their attitude towards language) and Ilya Kabakov. According to Boym, off-modernists “experimented with time and turned the device of estrangement into survival strategy. Their autobiographical texts and artworks were not only affectionate recollections of the past but also self-conscious reflections on nostalgic narrative” (257-8). For Nabokov, this is expressed in considerations of past, present and future as reversible, or as being different streams of time running in other directions. Off-modernists offer a unique, critical perspective on American culture as well, since they resist the general sentimentalization of the stories of immigrants and the commercialization of nostalgia.

Instead of sentimentality, off-modernists offer sensitivity, Boym writes, and they combine affection with estrangement. An important aspect of this is that the notion of ‘locale’ has to be reconsidered. What one experiences with a feeling of belonging does not need to be a locale in space anymore. As time is thought increasingly in terms of space, space itself can be thought temporally as well. Spaces that are geographically and temporally distant, like the exile’s original home, can become accessible through recognition of familiarity within the unfamiliar. “Nostalgia depends on materiality of place, sensual perceptions, smells and sounds. […] In this case, locale is not merely a context but also a remembered sensation and the material debris of past life” (258). The transcendence of nostalgia, then, consists of a coming to terms with ‘the unsettling instant of past recognition’: a moment at which one suddenly recognizes something that reminds of home, something one had put away so as to never think about it again, but then suddenly has to think about again, as if (reluctantly) entering into a contract with the uncanny.

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28 When Nabokov is a beginning writer, he works under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin, but Boym considers Sirin to commit creative suicide when the English-language writer of Vladimir Nabokov comes alive. According to her, this is necessary for survival: Sirin is mainly a poet, but poetic creation only refers back to itself and dwells in irreplaceable nostalgia. About the work that Nabokov makes under the name of Sirin, Boym writes: “Besides being virtually indistinguishable from many other poems of the Russian exile, this way of dealing with the past and present was a one-way road to tragedy and was nearly suicidal. The writer saved himself by killing his poetic creation Vladimir Sirin” (268). Nabokov moves from poetry to prose, because the narrative form allows him to bring fictional characters alive that follow journeys similar to his own. Different roads of fate can of course be explored in much more depth in narrative form than through the self-referential mechanism of poetry. Prose allow Nabokov to cross the ‘lyrical abyss’, as Boym calls it, “to turn a personal tragedy into an existential detective story with many artistic improvisations” (269). Indeed, most of Nabokov’s works can be considered ‘existential detective stories’: a tracing of the nature of existence through personal narratives, situational existences.

Nabokov is mostly the kind of nostalgic that furnishes his life, and thereby his stories, with doubles and ghosts. The notion of the ‘double’ is important for understanding nostalgic expression. One cannot live with double senses of self, so the ‘double’ aspect of living as an exile in a strange country is projected onto surroundings. In Speak, Memory, for instance, Nabokov writes about how he is always recalling patches of the past “with the utmost zest” (55). He writes: “I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. … That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die” (56). The longing for a lost place and an inaccessible time is so strong that it becomes a ‘robust reality’, something that is laid over the present as though the experience of the world is similar to double exposure.

Boym recalls visiting Nabokov’s childhood home, where she is struck by a comment by her Russian guide. When she references Nabokov’s own words of being a ‘pasportless spy’, he replies with: “that is YOUR Nabokov, not OUR Nabokov” (262). Back home, she finds out that the Russian version of Speak, Memory merely speaks of ‘doubles’, not of ‘spies’, which is remarkable to her. The English original has a political overtone, whereas the Russian version (written and published a few years later) reminds more of photography. Nabokov’s work is specked with nostalgic trails, nostalgia being the main drive in his fiction, and “the nostalgic trails are predicated on the impossibility of homecoming” (262). For Nabokov, nostalgia is both

"I Confess I Do Not Believe In Time": Exile and Temporality In Nabokov's Short Stories

“I Confess I Do Not Believe In Time”

Exile and Temporality in Nabokov’s Short Stories

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