Lectures on Russian literature

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

' 'I'll put them on directly,' he said.

'And he went off to get skates.

' 'It's a long while since we've seen you here, sir,' said the attendant, supporting his foot, and screwing on the skate to the heel. 'There have been no first-rate skaters among the gentlemen since your time. Will that be all right?' said he, tightening the strap.'

A little later, 'one of the young men, the best of the skaters after Lyovin's time, came out of the coffee-house in his skates, with a cigarette in his mouth. Taking a run, he dashed down the ice crusted steps in his skates, bouncing noisily. He flew down, and without even changing the relaxed position of his arms, skated away over the ice.

' 'Ah, that's a new trick!' said Lyovin, and he promptly ran up to the top to do this new trick.

' 'Don't break your neck! It needs practice!' Kitty's cousin shouted after him.

'Lyovin went on the porch, and running from above to gain impetus, he dashed down, preserving his balance in this unwonted motion with his arms. On the last step he stumbled, but barely touching the ice with his hand, with a violent effort recovered himself, and skated off, laughing.'

We are at a dinner party two years after Lyovin had been rejected by Kitty, a dinner party arranged by Oblonski. First let us retranslate the little passage about a slippery mushroom.

' 'You have killed a bear, I've been told!' said Kitty, trying assiduously to spear with her fork a slippery preserved mushroom, every little poke setting the lace quivering over her white arm. [The brilliant eye of the great writer always noting what his puppets are up to after he has given them the power to live.] 'Are there bears on your place?' she added, turning her charming little head to him and smiling.'

We come now to the famous chalk scene. After dinner Kitty and Lyovin are for a minute in a separate part of the room.

'Kitty, going up to a card-table, sat down, and, taking up the chalk, began drawing concentric circles upon the immaculate green cloth.

'They began again on the subject that had been started at dinner—the liberty and occupations of women. Lyovin shared Dolly's opinion that a girl who did not marry should find some occupation suitable for a lady, in her own family. . . .

'A silence followed. She was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood, he was pervaded with an increasing feeling of happiness.

' 'Akh! I have scrawled all over the table!' she said, and laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.

' 'What! Shall I be left alone—without her?' he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. 'Wait a minute,' he said, 'I've long wanted to ask you one thing.'

'He looked straight into her friendly, though frightened eyes.

' 'Please ask it.'

' 'Here,' he said; and he wrote the initial letters w,y, s, n, d,y,m,n. These letters meant, 'When you said no, did you mean never?' There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his 105

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then puckered her brow and began to read.

Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, 'Is it what I think?'

' 'I understand,' she said, flushing a little. ''What is this word?' he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.

' 'It means never,' she said; 'but that's not true!' 'He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d. . . . It meant, 'Then I could not answer differently.'

'He glanced at her questioningly, timidly. ' ' Only then?' 'Yes,' her smile answered. ''And now?' he asked.

''Well, read this,' she said. She wrote the initial letters f, a, f. This meant, 'Forget and forgive.' '

All this is a little far fetched. Although, no doubt, love may work wonders and bridge the abyss between minds and present cases of tender telepathy — still such detailed thought-reading, even in Russian, is not quite convincing. However, the gestures are charming and the atmosphere of the scene artistically true.

Tolstoy stood for the natural life. Nature, alias God, had decreed that the human female should experience more pain in childbirth than, say, a porcupine or a whale. Therefore Tolstoy was violently opposed to the elimination of this pain.

In Look magazine, a poor relation of Life, of April 8, 1952, there is a series of photos under the heading, 'I Photographed my Baby's Birth.' A singularly unattractive baby smirks in a corner of the page. Says the caption : Clicking her own camera as she lies on the delivery table, Mrs. A. H. Heusinkveld, a photography-writer (whatever that is) of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, records (says the caption) these extraordinary views of the birth of her first baby—from the early labor pains to the baby's first cry.

What does she take in the way of pictures? For instance: 'Husband [wearing a handpainted philistine tie, with a dejected expression on his simple face] visits wife in the midst of her pains' or 'Mrs. Heusinkveld shoots Sister Mary who sprays patient with disinfectants.'

Tolstoy would have violently objected to all this.

Except for a little opium, and that did not help much, no anaesthetics were used in those days for relieving the pains of childbirth. The year is 1875, and all over the world women were delivered in the same way as two thousand years ago.

Tolstoy's theme here is a double one, first, the beauty of nature's drama; and second, its mystery and terror as perceived by Lyovin. Modern methods of confinement —anaesthetics and hospitalization—would have made this great chapter 15 of part seven impossible, and the dulling of natural pain would have seemed quite wrong to Tolstoy the Christian. Kitty was having her baby at home, of course, Lyovin wanders about the house.

'He did not know whether it was late or early. The candles had all burned out. . . . He sat listening to the doctor's small talk.

. . . Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek from Kitty's room. The shriek was so awful that he did not even start but gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly. Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike Lyovin as strange. . . . Presently he tiptoed to the bedroom, edged around the midwife [Elizaveta] and Kitty's mother, and stood at Kitty's pillow. The scream had subsided but there was some change now. What it was he did not see and did not understand, and had no wish to see or understand. . . . Kitty's swollen and agonized face, a tress of hair clinging to her moist temple, was turned to him. Her eyes sought his eyes, her lifted hands asked for his hands. Clutching his cold hands in her hot ones, she began squeezing them to her face.

' 'Don't go, don't go! I am not afraid, I am not afraid. Mamma, take off my earrings, they bother me. . . .' [List these earrings with the handkerchief, the frost on the glove, and other little objects that Kitty handles in the course of the novel.] Then suddenly she pushed him away. 'Oh, this is awful, I am dying, go away,' she shrieked. . . .

'Lyovin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

' 'It's all right, everything is all right,' Dolly called after him. [She had gone through it seven times herself.]

' 'But,' thought Lyovin, 'they might say what they liked.' He knew now that all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning against the door-post, and heard someone emitting shrieks, howls, such as he had never heard before and he knew that this howling thing had been Kitty. But now he had long ago ceased to wish for the