Table Of ContentNabokov’s Shakespeare
Nabokov’s Shakespeare
Samuel Schuman
With a foreword by Brian Boyd
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Samuel Schuman, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schuman, Samuel.
Nabokov’s Shakespeare / Samuel Schuman.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62892-426-8 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-62892-271-4 (paperback) 1.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977--Criticism and interpretation.
2. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977--Knowledge--Literature.
3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616--Influence. 4. Shakespeare, William,
1564–1616--Criticism and interpretation. 5. American fiction--English influences.
I. Title.
PG3476.N3Z8628 2014
813’.54--dc23
2014003389
ISBN: 978-1-6289-2151-9
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Foreword Brian Boyd vii
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction: Shakespeare, Nabokov, and Me 1
1 “The Sun’s a Thief:” Nabokov’s Shakespeare 3
Nabokov, English, and English literature 5
Theme 7
A taxonomy of Nabokov’s Shakespeareanisms 10
Preview 13
2 The Russian Works 17
The Tragedy of Mr. Morn 17
“Shakespeare” 23
Translations 27
Early prose 28
The Wood Sprite 28
Glory 30
The Gift 31
Invitation to a Beheading 32
Laughter in the Dark 33
Despair 34
3 “Which is Sebastian?” What’s in a (Shakespearean and
Nabokovian) Name? 37
4 No Left Turn, or Something Rotten in the State: Bend Sinister
and Hamlet 45
5 Hurricane Lolita: The Nabokovian Tempest 59
6 Tempest Point on the Bohemian Sea: Pnin 77
7 The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: Pale Fire and Timon of
Athens 85
vi Contents
8 “O What a Noble Mind:” Ada and Hamlet 107
9 The Last Novels 131
Transparent Things 131
Look at the Harlequins! 135
10 A Miscellany of Other English Works 143
“That in Aleppo Once …” 143
Eugene Onegin 146
Speak, Memory 151
Reviews and notes 154
11 Concluding Thoughts 159
Appendix: Nabokov and Shakespeare: A Quantitative Approach 165
Works Consulted 171
Notes 177
Index 183
Foreword
Brian Boyd
Vladimir Nabokov famously denied that he had been influenced by even the
novelists he most admired: Dickens, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Proust, and Joyce. Yet
he happily affirmed that “Pushkin’s blood runs through the veins of modern
Russian literature as inevitably as Shakespeare’s through those of English liter-
ature.”1 In his most literary novels in each language, The Gift (1938) and Pale
Fire (1962), he has his writer-heroes pay conscious homage to Pushkin and
Shakespeare, respectively, even in the very titles of the works they are writing.
In the case of Pale Fire, the poet John Shade poses a puzzle for his
readers: where in Shakespeare has he gleaned the phrase “pale fire” that he
has taken for the title of his poem? In Kinbote’s crazy commentary to the
poem, Nabokov supplies the answer without Kinbote himself knowing it.
Early in the commentary, in another context, Kinbote writes that a variant
line in Shade’s poem recalls for him a passage from Timon of Athens. This
happens to be the very passage from which Shade has lifted his title, but
Kinbote, working from a mountain cabin, has with him only a Zemblan
version of the play, and the retranslation from the Zemblan that he cites
makes the key words disappear, along with much else. Kinbote concludes his
note with a cross-reference: “For a prudent appraisal of Conmal’s translation
of Shakespeare’s works, see note to line 962.” Readers who trust Nabokov’s
sanity and generosity behind Kinbote’s insane egotism can flip ahead to the
note to line 962 of Shade’s poem. That line begins, after Shade concedes
he needs some title for the poem he is writing: “Help me, Will! Pale Fire.”
Kinbote opens his commentary on the line:
Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for
something I might use for a title. And the find is “pale fire.” But in
which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make
their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of
Timon of Athens—in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could
be regarded as an equivalent of “pale fire” (if it had, my luck would have
been a statistical monster).
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell’s time.
Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by
heart) …
viii Foreword
The trusting, responsive and curious reader can zoom straight to Timon of
Athens and solve the riddle there, and enjoy not only the astonishing speech
from which Shade’s and Nabokov’s title comes but, on returning to Pale Fire,
the comedy of the Zemblan mistranslation.
But before getting there, or even after, the very good reader of Pale Fire
and of Shakespeare may wonder at an echo from Hamlet—the play, as Sam
Schuman notes, that Nabokov refers to most often, a work Nabokov even
called “probably the greatest miracle in all literature.”2 The Ghost, speaking
to Hamlet, has to vanish when he notices the coming day:
The glowworm shows the matin to be near,
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.
If indeed we do remember these memorable lines, we may wonder whether
they provide the answer to Shade’s puzzle—until, or perhaps even after, we
find the answer in Timon of Athens. Does Nabokov (and perhaps Shade,
whose name—a common English word but almost never a surname—can
itself mean “ghost”) intend us to think also of the Ghost’s words from
Hamlet? Readers who know how well Nabokov knows Shakespeare may
suspect he could well have recollected “pale his uneffectual fire” as he
collected Timon’s denunciation of universal thievery, “the moon’s an arrant
thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.” But how would we know
that Nabokov intends that glowworm phrase, too, to glow within his “pale
fire”? One hauntingly beautiful passage in Pale Fire provides the answer: yes,
Nabokov did mean the title Pale Fire to evoke the parting words of King
Hamlet’s ghost, along with Timon of Athens, and no, he didn’t want this to
be easy to find out.3
The example shows how Nabokov plays with and pays homage to the
way Shakespeare pervades English literature at its best. In John Shade’s
American college town, New Wye, there is even an avenue of all the trees
mentioned by Shakespeare (the list of those that Kinbote can recall, poetry
in itself, offers a wonderful challenge to our memories or an incitement to
future reading). In Onhava, the capital of Zembla, a deposed king—in itself
a very Shakespearean role—flees through a theater, in costume, and escapes
via Coriolanus Lane and Timon Alley. Shakespeare, for Nabokov, simply
saturates and illuminates the world of English literature.
This swift tour through some Shakespearean sites in Pale Fire indicates,
apart from anything else, just how un-Shakespearean, how uniquely
Nabokovian, Nabokov is, as well as how steeped in Shakespeare. No more
for Nabokov than for John Shade does Shakespeare’s capacity to inspire other
writers mean “influence” in a sense anything like imitation.
Foreword ix
I began with a list of prose writers Nabokov denied ever having influ-
enced him, and his affirmation nevertheless that Shakespeare and Pushkin
flow inevitably through the veins of modern English or Russian literature.
Nabokov began his career as a poet but in his early twenties had discovered
that prose was his forte. Nevertheless he always aspired to impart to his prose
every quality of poetry but line, meter and rhyme, and was delighted when
his friend, the great Spanish poet Jorge Guillén, inscribed one of his books
to him: “poète en deux langues, en prose et en vers, toujours poète” (“poet
in two languages, in prose and in verse, always a poet”).4 When Nabokov
was teaching at Cornell and had begun to become famous in America as
he once had been in the Russian emigration, the young writer Steve Katz
asked Nabokov for feedback on his unpublished novel. Nabokov wrote on
the manuscript: “Nothing ages faster than ‘stark realism’ … You have to
saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose.
You must know your tool. You do not. You cannot begin all over again with
the Canterbury Tales, in comic-strip English … Suggestion: Read: Milton,
Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth.”5 Shakespeare hardly needed naming, but
Nabokov named poets particularly steeped in their Elizabethan precursor.
Nabokov was harsh on his own early verse. In his autobiography, Speak,
Memory, whose prose is the most poetic in all his books, he critiques his
teenage self:
The hackneyed order of words (short verb or pronoun—long adjective—
short noun) engendered the hackneyed disorder of thought, and some
such line as poeta gorestnïe gryozï, translatable and accented as “the
poet’s melancholy daydreams,” led fatally to a rhyming line ending in
rozï (roses) or beryozï (birches) or grozï (thunderstorms), so that certain
emotions were connected with certain surroundings not by a free act of
one’s will but by the faded ribbon of tradition.6
Nabokov, it seems to me, thought that young writers should read poetry
not to imitate, not to ride in others’ slipstreams, but as a form of resistance
training. Instead of exercising language with no resistance, the common-
place conjunctions of everyday speech or the clichés—whether words,
images, or rhymes—of conventional verse, writers’ imaginations need to be
stretched by words at maximum resistance to the norm. No one has ever
resisted the norms of his language—the natural words, the set idioms, the
expected images, the grammatical grooves—more boldly and incessantly
than Shakespeare. Any writer lucky enough to understand Shakespeare in
the original should train in his or her mental gym in order to learn to dare
in every phrase, to write “by a free act of … will” rather than by following
“the faded ribbon of tradition.”
