The Enchanter

In his 1986 book Field ventilates the hypothesis that Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov or by someone else. He ends by affirming, nonetheless, that “it can be said with absolute certainty… that there is some link between the work of Agheyev and Sirin,” because there happens to be a partial assonance between the names of Agheyev’s character Sinat[12] and Nabokov’s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading.

The Sinat-Cincinnatus connection falls into the same category of scholarship as, say, Field’s overblown claptrap about an extramarital affair, the total tripe about secret heavy drinking, the nonsensical conjectures about Father’s death, or the contention that Nabokov, in his letters to his mother, addressed her as “Lolita” (whereon Field constructs a typical house of marked cards). In the latter case his reasoning goes as follows: Father, with the natural reserve of a gentleman, had preferred to omit the term of endearment with which he habitually addressed his mother, whose name was Helene, from the copies of the letters he showed to Field before Field revealed his true colors. Field, after having consumed, I suppose, many magnifying glasses, gleaned the trace of the “tail or hat” of a Cyrillic t at the edge of the blank space where the salutation had been excised (incidentally, the handwritten lowercase Cyrillic t generally resembles a small Roman m, and is, therefore, tailless and hatless). For that reason, and because the missing word was “about seven letters long,” and also because Father had told him that “Lyolya” was a perfectly normal Russian diminutive for “Helene,” and God knows for what other reasons, Field concludes (not without a trace of personal outrage), that it was “Lolita, surely,” and, characteristically, proceeds to refer to this absurdity as an established fact further on in his book.

Not only does “Lolita” have only six letters; not only would the Latin derivation have been unthinkable within the parameters of Russian etymology, where Spanish cognates did not enjoy the same favor as French or English ones; but the word deleted out of a sense of privacy and out of respect for the memory of a beloved mother was the Russian “radost’” (“joy,” “dearest”). It was Nabokov’s habitual salutation to his mother, and, of course, we have the original letters to prove it. And “Lolita Haze” was “Juanita Dark” in Father’s drafts of the novel until very late in the game. So much for “Lolita, surely.”

But let us leave Field among his ruins and revisit another corner of the scrap heap briefly to bury the Agheyev matter, whose relevance here is the dramatic dissimilarity between that author’s work and The Enchanter.

Research by Frank Williams, who originally reviewed the English version of the Agheyev book in the TLS on 5 July 1985; by the French literary journalist Alain Garric who went all the way to Istanbul while preparing a lengthy article on the subject for Liberation; and by others, has confirmed the following sequence of events.

After Novel with Cocaine originally appeared in Numbers and aroused a certain curiosity in emigre circles, a Russian lady in Paris named Lydia Chervinskaya was asked to track down “Agheyev” with the help of her parents, who happened to live in Istanbul, whence the manuscript had originally been sent. Chervinskaya found him there, confined to a mental institution because of tremors and convulsions. After being rescued by the lady’s father, Agheyev became a friend of the family and grew close to Chervinskaya, to whom he confided his real name—Mark Levi—and his complex and motley history, which included the killing of a Russian officer, flight to Turkey, and obsession with drugs.

Levi-Agheyev went with Chervinskaya to Paris but, after a sojourn there, returned to Istanbul, where he died, presumably from the consequences of cocaine abuse, in 1936.

V. S. Yanovsky, who was associated with Numbers when the manuscript was first received in Paris, and who now lives in a suburb of New York City, confirmed in an interview reported in The New York Times (8 October 1985) that, when the manuscript arrived for publication in Russian, it bore the unequivocally Jewish signature “Levi,” and that, somewhere along the line, it was decided to substitute “a more Russian-sounding name.” Finally, inquiries by the translator of the French version of the novel that appeared in 1982, cited by Williams, reveal that “a Mark Abramovich Levi was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Istanbul in February 1936.”

While no literary adventurer would have a leg to stand on if he were to question the authorship of The Enchanter, Professor Struve appears determined to persist in his benighted and quixotic campaign to ascribe the Agheyev work, as well, to VN, who, except for a brief contribution on a very different subject to its first issue, submitted no material to Numbers, which had rudely attacked him shortly thereafter; had never visited Moscow, where the novel is set, with a considerable amount of local detail; never used cocaine or other drugs; and wrote, unlike Agheyev, in pure, correct St. Petersburg Russian. Furthermore, if indeed there had been any connection between Nabokov and Novel with Cocaine, someone among his literary acquaintances would have had an inkling of it, and, if not, then his wife, first reader, and typist Vera Nabokov would surely have known.

The stucco parapet of the Florida terrace where I am writing at this moment—the kind with white paint covering a deliberately uneven surface—is full of random patterns. It takes only a pencil stroke here and there to complete an excellent hippopotamus, a stern Flemish profile, a busty showgirl, or any number of friendly or disconcerting little free-form monsters.

This is what Nabokov, who early in life had seriously considered becoming a painter, could do so well with an ornate lampshade, for example, or some repetitively flowered wallpaper. Comical faces, nonexistent but plausible butterflies, and grotesque little creatures of his own invention gradually came to inhabit hospitable designs of the quarters at the Montreux-Palace Hotel, where he lived and worked, and some of them happily survive to this day, preserved either on our express instructions or by the limited capacity for observation of the cleaning teams that storm, like a defensive football line, through those rooms every afternoon. A few particularly good ones have, alas, long since been deterged from the tiles adjacent to the bathtub that, to Field’s apparent consternation, Father used every day.

Such enhancement and recombination of chance patterns are, in a larger sense, an essential part of Nabokov’s creative synthesis. The fortuitous observation, the reported or imagined psychological anomaly, elaborated by the artist’s fantasy, assumed a harmonious growth of their own as the infant work was gradually weaned from the image, the news item, or the reverie that had jolted its cells into the process of multiplication.

Like certain of Nabokov’s other works, The Enchanter is the study of madness seen through the madman’s mind. Aberrations in general, both physical and psychological, were among the diverse sources of raw material that nurtured Nabokov’s artistic fantasy. The criminal pedophilia of the protagonist—like that of the later Humbert in a new work and a different setting; like the murderous delusion of Hermann in Despair; like the sexual anomalies that are but one element of Pale Fire and other works; like the madness of the chess master Luzhin [13] and the musician Bachmann;[14] like the deformations of the Potato Elf,[15] and of the Siamese twins in “The Double Monster”[16] —was one among many themes Nabokov selected for the creative process of fictional recombination.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled… in a unique and inimitable way

writes Nabokov in the concluding sentence of his 1925 short story “The Fight.”[17] This early expression, forthright yet undogmatic, of what was to remain an enduring aspect of his aesthetic approach, is, I suspect, destined to be quoted often, and not always in context.

“Perhaps,” the word with which Nabokov introduced the thought, is an important qualifier. As a creative writer rather than a journalist, social commentator, or psychoanalyst, Nabokov chose to examine the phenomena of his surroundings through the refractive lens of artistry; at the same time his codex for literary creation is no less precise than the scientific purity of his lepidopterological investigations. But even if his emphasis is on the “combinational delights” in which an artist is privileged to indulge, by no means does it follow that Nabokov was indifferent to the horrors of tyranny, murder, and child molestation; to the tragedy of social or personal injustice; or