Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics

I stood in the school hallway, waiting for my son in the gym at the baseball clinic. It lasted two hours, too long for small talk with the other dads, so I was reading the final chapters of Nina Khrushcheva's "Imagining Nabokov". For me, it was a chance to learn more about a writer and another literature, about writing in a second language and culture, even as I stood surrounded by this very familiar sports culture. When other dads passed by I covered the book a bit so I didn't seem so out of touch with the going concern of the day - baseball. If his dad seemed aloof or bookish, would his son be cut from the team? Would he be shunned by the other kids? Would I seem to be acting superior, even in a high school where you might expect reading to be encouraged, yet where I felt almost entirely out of place, as if living a segment of "The Diary of a Madman". One dad passed by and saw the Khrushchev name on the dust cover. He started talking about the cold war and grimly praised the author's forebear as someone overly vilified by the U.S. I nodded to agree. That was a close call, but it made me feel more comfortable, so I read on. In two hours, the clinic ended and I had finished the last chapters. I wanted to tell the dads in the hallway to read this book and to tell their sons about it. The author draws you easily into another world of ideas, one not even necessarily opposed to baseball! The world of great literature can exist with the world of sports and the ordinary - "mens sana in corpore sano". This book expands the imagination and neatly passes from culture to politics and back again. It should be read in serious high schools as well as anywhere else. And my son made the team.

I am so grateful to Nikita's great-granddaughter Nina for providing me with an excuse to talk about my favorite writer. Of course I had read everything available from Nabokov's Russian period in German or English translations, and from the American period more than once in the original. He was one of the greatest prose writers (let us ignore his poetry and his stage writing) of the 20th century, and he was the only writer that I know who achieved the top plateau in two languages. (The only comparison that occurs to me, J. Conrad, was a transcultural writer, but did he do anything substantial in Polish before he became an English writer? And as an English writer he never quite lost the touch of looking like a translation.) VN was poetic, funny, provocative, playful, political, a-political, esoteric, scientific, opinionated, vain, in summary great. He is the only writer who motivated me to make a pilgrimage: I travelled to St.Petersburg mainly in order to visit the Nabokov Museum there, in the appartment where he had grown up during pre-revolution times. Nina feels close to him: though she was a voluntary expatriate compared to his double-refugeedom (first from the Bolshies, then from the Nazis), both had made this transition from Russian ruling class to American middle class. She sees more in him than an outstanding Russian exile author with a second language. He is a role model for a modernised Russia. And this is where I want to step out quietly, I can't comment on that subject, but I find her observations fascinating. And I keep learning Russian on my bucket list.

Imagining Nabokov is one of those history's witty jokes: the cold war is over, and the author proves her great-granddad kitchen debates wrong--she falls in love with the most anti-communist dissident writer of the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov. Actually, it is his posthumous statue that stands in Montreux, Switzerland, she is in love with. The statue story is just a hook, though. This is a charming, and rather unusual book that however succeeds in explaining the Russians' obsession with their literature and their soul. Indeed the Economist review published in February praised the book for that very reason.

An excellent book, and just in time when the Putin question is big in the news. It interconnects literature and politics, providing compelling reasons at to why Russia is so brilliant at art, but is its own worst enemy when it comes to democracy. This fascinating book addresses a problem of Russia's "lopsided" development, i.e. why Russia is a problem for Russians in a way that America isn't for Americans. Russia's problem is that "hypothetical and literary projects have a far greater hold on Russian people than practical ones." The idealistic and unrealistic character of Russian thinking makes Russians incapable of pursuing realistic goals. The American Utopia is realistic, in Russia it is dream-like. Russians have an ingrained sense of the country's uniqueness and special messianic status. First, it was the holy Russian soul, then Russia as the Third Rome, then Russian imperialism, then communism which united the imperial and spiritual missions. Now Putin tells Russians that natural resources offer them the key to regaining their former might. In Russian culture, communal values and a `great state' agenda take priority over individual and practical principles. As Dostoievsky put it : "We may be backward, but we have souls." Nina Khrushcheva convincingly argues that Nabokov is a better guide to the future than Dostoyevsky, because his characters `take responsibility for their lives.' In America, Nabokov taught Khrushcheva how to be a single `I' rather than a member of the many `we' in that "vast undifferentiated traditional Russian collective of the peasant commune, the proletarian mass, the Soviet people, the post-communist Rossiyane."

This book constitutes a new genre--part literary criticism (of Nabokov's novels), part political science (about Russia and the West), and part magical realism (about the author's own imagined relationship with Nabokov). All written in a voice that slips in and out of Nabokov's own. The book may have rivals as scholarly criticism of Nabokov's novels, but it certainly have none as a commentary on Nabokov's hinterland and sensibilities. Relating Nabokov's fictional world to the contemporary Russian politics and society is a fresh and original look at Russia that the reader needs.