Energetic Idleness

In Nabokov’s novel The Gift (1938) the young poet Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev is solitary and gifted. A virtuoso of perception, he sees around him many small, delightful details – a shopkeeper’s pumpkincoloured bald spot; an iridescent oil slick on a road with a plume-like twist, asphalt’s parakeet – that others around him miss.

This capacity makes him one of nature’s aristocrats, as Clarence Brown once wrote of the poet Mandelstam, refined, elegant and immeasurably, immaterially rich. He also happens to be a literal aristocrat, a Russian count dispossessed of his estates by the Revolution and living in apparently permanent exile in Berlin in the mid-1930s. He lodges in furnished rooms and scratches a living as a private tutor while his first collection of poems sells a few copies to fellow émigrés. His girlfriend Zina is perfectly attuned to him emotionally and intellectually and happens to be Jewish. These circumstances might be expected to produce a bitter, strenuous political engagement in Fyodor, but he has only disdain for politics and the wider life of society and keeps his intellect apart, entirely devoted to the ‘complex, happy, devout work’ of writing that can only be conducted in a state of ‘energetic idleness’, in ‘lofty truancy’. In this, he bears a family resemblance to two other fictional aesthetes of incipient genius, Proust’s Marcel and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. I was very impressed by Fyodor as a teenager and longed to join that prickly cohort of arch individualists, to write poems of lasting value myself, and to live in that repetition of aesthetic bliss to which they were all committed. I read a great deal of Nabokov. He was one of the few prose writers whose work had the concentrated richness of poetry, my preferred form, and I was bewitched by his brilliance, his dashing, unashamed intelligence and the comprehensive dislike he has for received opinion and group activity that makes liking him feel like a rising above. Recently, though, I’ve found him harder to read, his formal games impressive but uninteresting. This is a matter of taste only: I am bored by anagrams and metatextual jokes, and would take a single Isaac Babel short story over the heftiest Pynchon novel. After his switch from Russian to English, Nabokov wrote in a language in which he was divorced from the demotic and his pavonine prose lacks the animating speech rhythms, the sense of breath and natural cadence, that are always present in Joyce, Lawrence, Bellow and Woolf. Rather than being earthed beside us, his prose genius seems airborne above us, swooping and gliding. So it is interesting to return to The Gift now and find that this novel still mesmerizes me for long stretches and to wonder whether a Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev could come into being at all in our present moment with its materialism and saturating pop culture, its social media and monetized interruptions. Fyodor’s disdain for general thought and its clichés is absolute and extends even to literature that makes any schematic inferences about society or displays any overt political affiliation. Nabokov’s own hatred of the political is well known, but I think it is possible to perceive in his abstention an implied politics: an aristocratic liberalism that is in favour of the humane and the particular and that affirms Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, the freedom from coercion and oppression. The Gift, uniquely, I think, in Nabokov’s work, reveals how erudite and thought through his position really was, even as it typically refuses to be explicit. The Gift is altogether an erudite book. Its heroine is not Zina, Nabokov tells us in his 1962 preface to the first English translation, but Russian literature. It was the last novel he wrote in Russian before his switch to English and it is saturated with references to Russian writers he admires – Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Fet, Blok, Bunin and others – as well as a group of primarily political, materialist writers of the 1860s – Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev – whom he deplores. You don’t have to be well-read in Russian literature to enjoy The Gift but it certainly helps, to catch, for example, the imagistic accuracy of this line: ‘Dostoevsky always brings to mind somehow a room in which a lamp burns during the day.’ Comprising five long chapters of varying, overlapping focus, The Gift is circular rather than linear in design, allowing the reader to dwell in Fyodor’s life and mind for a while rather than follow him on a particular adventure. The novel ends with Fyodor conceiving in a lucid, exhilarated rush of ideas the novel that we have just read and promising to write it in the future. During the course of The Gift, we’re given several opportunities to read Fyodor’s writing, both poetry and prose. In chapter one, hearing of a good review, Fyodor rereads his collection of poems, all neatly turned scenes of childhood, and reminisces around them, his memories thereby presented in both fluid and crystalline form. In his later memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov talks of his ‘hypertrophied sense of lost childhood’. The same passionate nostalgia pervades Fyodor’s poems. They are the form taken by his grief for a lost home, family unity and a way of life. As a result, they are perhaps too sweet. Evelyn Waugh, who wrote Brideshead Revisited during the privations of the Second World War, said afterwards that, ‘with a full stomach’, he found its ornamental language distasteful. In fact, there is a strain of earnest lyricism that runs through all of The Gift and that may be too much for some. Beauty seems to exist as a separate, usually visual and highly coloured, category of experience, distilled in such phrases as ‘the sunset cloudlets were trimmed with flamingo down’. Too much of this stuff and the reader can feel as if they’ve eaten too much cake. The same high sugar content can be found in the romance between Fyodor and Zina with its faultless, high-minded mutual understanding and surging throb of lyrical feeling. ‘She fell silent, and Fyodor cautiously kissed her burning, melting, sorrowing lips.’ His sincere evocation of romantic perfection, to my mind, fails to convince, though later this failure will be transmuted into the success of Lolita in which Humbert Humbert’s great arias of evocation and passion for Dolores Haze ring both true and false in exactly the right way. The news of the celebratory review of Fyodor’s poems turns out to have been an April Fool’s joke. The Gift is superb in dealing with the indignities as well as the exaltations of a young writer’s life. It matches Joyce in its depiction of a mind besotted with language, listening in to words and their possibilities, often in precise and technical terms. With equal precision, the psychology of young, insurgent literary ambition is anatomized. Fyodor at one point agonizes over the success of a contemporary,

a man whose every new searing line he, Fyodor, despising himself, quickly and avidly devoured in a corner, trying by the very act of reading to destroy the marvel of it – after which for two days or so he could not rid himself either of what he had read or of his own feeling of debility or of a secret ache, as if while wrest-ling with another he had injured his own innermost, sacrosanct particle.

There are excellent portraits of second-rate poets and writers, too, gathered at an émigré literary evening, intoning symboliste or neo-classical nonsense with great solemnity. Chapter four consists entirely of Fyodor’s work, his wayward and brilliant biography of Chernyshevsky, a hero of the Bolsheviks, exiled in the nineteenth century, and the author of the earnestly incompetent novel What Is to Be Done? In The Gift, he is also an ancestor of the couple whose literary evening we attended in chapter one. Fyodor, like Nabokov, disavows politics for its abstraction, its distance from the reality of original sensory experience. This is succinctly put in the description of a character earlier in the novel.

Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine reports he read in the papers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind . . . could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events . . . France was AFRAID of something or other and therefore would never ALLOW it. England was AIMING at something. This statesman CRAVED a rapprochement . . .

In his biography, Fyodor mocks Chernyshevsky the socialist materialist for his disconnection from the material world, his clumsiness and myopia, his inability to tell plants apart. Communists throughout the novel are mocked for their physical infirmities, their ugly incapacity or bourgeois stupidity. The participants in a rally are described as ‘battered by life, some crookbacked, others lame or sickly, a lot of plain-looking women and several sedate petty-bourgeois’. As well as being reprehensible for its equation of disability or unattractiveness with moral debasement, this is simply crude thought, unworthy of Nabokov. In the Chernyshevsky chapter, we come across passages that by contrast display a great deal of knowledge about political and philosophical thought:

the political regime that was supposed to appear as the synthesis in the syllogism, where the thesis was the commune, resembled not so much Soviet Russia as the utopias of the day. The world of Fourier, the harmony of the twelve passions, the bliss of collective living, the rose-garlanded workmen – all this could not fail to please Chernyshevsky, who was always looking for ‘coherency’. Let us dream of the phalanstery living in a palace: 1,800 souls and all happy!

Much as he liked to dissemble the fact, it seems that Nabokov knew very well whereof he chose not to speak. The Chernyshevsky chapter was not included in the original publication of the novel in the late 1930s, rejected as a character assassination of an important figure, the same reason it is rejected by an editor within the novel, ‘a pretty example of life finding itself obliged to imitate the very art it condemns’, as Nabokov put it in his later preface. Here Nabokov is taking pleasure in the patterning of otherwise humanly regrettable material. The Gift is a rich lesson in the redeeming value of such pleasure and its abundance, if you know how to pay attention. Fyodor may have lost his home and – like Nabokov, though in different circumstances – his father, and be without any obvious cause for hope, but he loves the world unstintingly. In the final chapter, he notices many beautiful things as he walks through Berlin in good weather, sparkles of sunlight on the street, a disintegrating cloud of train steam, the ‘wonderful poetry of railroad banks’.

Where shall I put all these gifts with which the summer morning rewards me – and only me? Store them up for future books? Use them immediately for a practical handbook: How to Be Happy? Or get behind all this, behind the play, the sparkle, the thick, green greasepaint of the foliage? For there really is something, there is something! And one wants to offer thanks but there is no one to thank.

Despite all their losses, Nabokov and Fyodor know how to be happy. Their gifts of perception and patterning reveal the world to them and console furthermore with intimations of something mys- terious beyond delightful appearances, something that is gentle and wonderful and benign. Whether we are persuaded by this metaphysical implication or not, The Gift convinces that keeping faith with direct personal experience and the making of art, beautiful, tender, useless art, is of inestimable value.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Adam Foulds 2019