NATASHA

other universities, Stanford, Wellesley and Cornell. Not that his financial hardship reduced Nabokov's considerable pride. When Rachmaninov sent the struggling writer some of his old clothes, Nabokov, who was something of a dandy and the son of possibly the best-dressed man in the entire history of St Petersburg,* returned the suits to the composer, complaining that they had been tailored 'in the period of the Prelude'.⁶⁸

* Nabokov pere was famous for his finely tailored English suits, which he wore, without self-consciousness, in the Duma assembly, where many of the rural deputies were dressed in peasant clothes (A. Tyrkova-Williams, Na putiakh k svobode (New York, 1952), P. 2.70). His sartorial extravagance was a common source of anecdotes in pre-revolutionary Petersburg. It was even said that he sent his underpants to England to be washed.

'America is my home now,' Nabokov said in interviews in 1964. 'I am an American writer.'⁶⁹ Despite his sometimes rather scathing portraits of the USA (most notoriously in Lolita), it appears the sentiment was genuinely held. Nabokov liked to play the real American. Having lost the Nabokov inheritance in the Old World way, through revolution, he had earned his fortune in the New World way: by hard work and brains.⁷⁰ The bounty of Lolita was a badge of his success as an American, and he wore it with great pride. 'This is the only known case in history when a European pauper ever became his own American uncle', writes an envious but admiring reviewer of the Russian writer and emigre Vadim (read: Nabokov) in Look at the Harlequins! (1974).⁷¹ Nabokov would not tolerate any criticism of America. He was a patriot. Throughout his life he kept the oath which he had sworn when he became a US citizen in 1945. When Gallimard produced a cover design for the French edition of Pnin showing the professor standing on the US flag, Nabokov objected to the Stars and Stripes 'being used as a floor coverage or a road surfacing'.⁷²

Nabokov's anti-Soviet politics were at the core of his Americanism. He sided with McCarthy. He despised the liberals who harboured sympathies for the Soviet Union. He refused to have anything to do with Soviet Russia - even at the height of the Second World War when it was an ally of the West. When Nabokov learned, in 1945, that Vasily Maklakov, the official representative of the Russian emigres in France, had attended a luncheon at the Soviet embassy in Paris, and had drunk a toast 'to the motherland, to the Red Army, to Stalin', he wrote in anger to a friend:

I can understand denying one's principles in one exceptional case: if they told me that those closest to me would be tortured or spared according to my reply, I would immediately consent to anything, ideological treachery or foul deeds and would even apply myself lovingly to the parting on Stalin's backside. Was Maklakov placed in such a situation? Evidently not.

All that remains is to outline a classification of the emigration. I distinguish five main divisions:

1. The philistine majority, who dislike the Bolsheviks for taking from them their little bit of land or money, or twelve Ilf-and-Petrov chairs.

2. Those who dream of pogroms and a Rumanian Tsar, and now fraternize with the Soviets because they sense in the Soviet Union the Soviet Union of the Russian people.

3. Fools.

4. Those who ended up across the border by inertia, vulgarians and careerists who pursue their own advantage and lightheartedly serve any leader at all.

5. Decent freedom-loving people, the old guard of the Russian intelligentsia, who unshakeably despise violence against language, against thought, against truth.⁷³

Nabokov placed himself in the final category. In his courses on Russian literature he refused to lecture on any literature since 1917, although in his classes at Cornell he made a concession for Akhmatova and the poetry of Pasternak.* Nabokov maintained that the communist regime had prevented the development of an 'authentic literature'.⁷⁴ He was equally hostile to the realist tradition of the nineteenth century which looked to literature for social content and ideas - a tradition which he rightly saw as a predecessor of the Soviet approach to literature. It was on this basis that he criticized both Dr Zhivago ('dreary conventional stuff), which competed with Lolita at the top of the bestseller lists in 1958, and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (1973-5) ('a kind of juicy journalese, formless, wordy and repetitious')⁷⁵ - although there must have been some jealousy at work

* Nabokov was normally dismissive of Akhmatova and of the many female imitators of her early style. In Pnin the professor's estranged wife Liza sings out 'rhythmically, in long-drawn, deep- voiced tones' a cruel parody of Akhmatova's verse:

'I have put on a dark dress And am more modest than a nun; An ivory crucifix Is over my cold bed.

But the lights of fabulous orgies Burn through my oblivion, And I whisper the name George -Your golden name!'

(V. Nabokov, Pnin (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 47). Akhmatova was deeply offended by the parody, which had played upon the 'half-harlot, half-nun' image used by Zhdanov in 1948 (L.Chukovskaia, Zapiskiob Anne Akhmatovoi, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980), vol. 2, p. 383).

there as well (for unlike Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov never won the Nobel Prize). And yet, despite his political denials, he felt a deep attachment to the Russian tradition. He longed to write another novel in his native tongue. He felt that there was something of his tragic hero Pnin - the bumbling, noble-hearted emigre professor of Russian who cannot quite adapt to his American environment - not only in himself but in all the best emigres.

In 1965 Nabokov worked on a Russian translation of Lolita. In the afterword to the English edition he had referred to his switch from Russian into English as a 'private tragedy'. But he now began his afterword to the Russian edition by confessing that the process of translating his prose back again had been disillusioning:

Alas, that 'marvellous Russian language' that I thought awaited me somewhere, blossoming like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had kept safe for so many years, proved to be nonexistent, and beyond the gate are nothing but charred stumps and the hopeless autumnal vista, and the key in my hand is more like a jimmy.⁷⁶

The Russian language had moved on since Nabokov left his native land, and 'the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions' which he had used like a magician in his early Russian novels were now lost on his Soviet audience.

4

When the poet Zinaida Gippius and her husband Dmitry Merezhkov-sky arrived in Paris in 1919 they opened the door of their flat with their own key and found everything in place: books, linen, kitchenware.⁷⁷ Exile was a return to their second home. For many of the old St Petersburg elite, coming to Paris was like returning to the old cosmopolitan lifestyle that they themselves had imitated in St Petersburg. The Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, brother-in-law to the last Tsar, arrived in Paris in the same year as the Merezhkovskys and made like a homing pigeon for the Ritz Hotel - his bills paid courtesy of a rare collection of Tsarist coins with which he had fled from his native land. This Paris was

not so much a 'Little Russia' as a microcosm (and continuation) of the extraordinary cultural renaissance in St Petersburg between 1900 and 1916. Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Benois, Bakst, Shaliapin, Goncharova, Koussevitsky and Prokofiev - they all made Paris home.

The effect of the arrival of such emigres was to accentuate two related facets of Russia's cultural image in the West. The first of these was a renewed appreciation of the European character of Russian culture as manifested in the so-called 'neoclassical' style of Stravinsky, Prokofiev and the Ballets Russes. Stravinsky himself disliked the term, claiming that it meant 'absolutely nothing' and that music, by its very nature, could not express anything at all.⁷⁸ But his neoclassicism was itself a statement of artistic principles. It was a conscious rejection of the Russian peasant music of his early neo-nationalist phase, of the violent Scythian rhythms in The Rite of Spring which had erupted in the Revolution of 1917. Forced into exile, Stravinsky now clung nostalgically to the ideal of beauty embodied in the classical inheritance of his native Petersburg. He borrowed from Bach and Pergolesi and, above all, from the Italo-Slavs (Berezovsky, Glinka and Tchaikovsky) who had shaped a