Vladimir Nabokov, Our Great Immigrant Novelist
In the introduction to his essay collection Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said states that if the immigrant writer “cannot take for granted the luxury of long residence, habitual environment, native idiom, and you must somehow compensate for these things, what you write necessarily bears a unique freight of anxiety, elaborateness, perhaps even overstatement.” Though Said wrote this to analyze exile’s role in artistic production and criticism, its sentiments carry forth to the everyday experience of immigrants in the United States. With their right to exist threatened daily, the immigrant must face a new challenge, one wrapped with anxiety and uncertainty. Having to move away from their old worlds and homes, they must create new homes and new worlds without a playbook for doing so correctly.
These are the themes echoed in a recent and wonderful lecture by Prof. Maria Cristina Garcia, history, entitled “Origin Stories: Myth and History in the American Immigration Experience.” Hosted by Phi Beta Kappa, the lecture traced the economic needs, political policies and social attitudes regarding immigration in the United States across its short history, focusing on how these dynamics affected immigrant’s lives and circumstances. Professor Garcia brilliantly showed the historical precedent for much of the current debate surrounding border control and refugee admissions, using the past to understand better where the rhetoric on immigration comes from. We learn that there is much more to the story of immigrants outside the nice cliches of America as a “nation of immigrants,” and about how immigrants had to struggle to belong in this new nation, weathering xenophobic rhetoric to create new homes and communities.
Very few writers have written the immigrant experience into their oeuvre as movingly as Cornell’s very own Vladimir Nabokov. Particularly in his American years, Nabokov brings forth the immigrant experience as a key thematic concern, wrestling with the tragedy and beauty of immigrant life. His experiences as a refugee fleeing Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany formed the skeleton he used to model his most notorious characters and their world. The poor Timofey Pnin flees Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to become a professor of Russian at Waindell College in New England. The mad Charles Kinbote arrives in America by parachute, escaping his fictional kingdom of Zembla to become a professor at Wordsmith College in New Wye. The vain and cruel Humbert Humbert “smuggled his real self” into America, as Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd states, arriving in the United States after a brief detour to Portugal, bringing the darkness within unto this new land (he ends up teaching later on in Lolita). Though some of these figures are wholly dissimilar to the real-life Nabokov, their immigrant backgrounds play a crucial role in their development as characters. Coming to America as a break from their old worlds is the inciting incident for their stories, and they would not exist were it not for Nabokov’s own break from his native Europe across the Atlantic.
Nabokov was no stranger to the distrust many immigrants faced. In his biography, Brian Boyd notes that Nabokov felt a “strong prejudice against Russian émigrés” persisting in his new home, with the study of Russian émigrés literature neglected “even among Russian specialists, until well into the 1960s.” What were some of the sentiments Russian immigrants faced in the United States? The narrator of Pnin tells us that for the American public, the mass of Russian émigrés comprised a “vague and perfectly fictitious mass of so-called Trotskiites (whatever these are), ruined reactionaries, reformed or disguised Cheka men, titled ladies, professional priests, restaurant keepers and White Russian military groups, all of them of no cultural importance whatever.” Like many immigrants today, both Nabokov and Pnin had to navigate an environment that was not always open to their presence and refused to acknowledge any value in their hard work or culture whatsoever.
Yet there is a different, more private tragedy Nabokov felt leaving his native Russia. He tells us: “I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses — the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions — which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.” Like Joseph Conrad before him, Nabokov had to exchange his mother tongue, the language coloring his memories, for a different language, one that could never be like the old. Nabokov’s struggle was that of the bilingual immigrant: to express with a newer, weaker language the idioms, phrases and meanings found within the mother tongue, trying to maintain the richness and feeling of the old language. It is the Sisyphean task Nabokov undergoes in his novels written in English, trying to find the right phrase, right textures and right metaphor to imbue his works with the literary magic of his Russian.
However, within this struggle comes new possibilities. In this fight to find the right language without the mother tongue by their side, the immigrant writer can create new lenses of looking at our world and illuminate the beauty within the everyday. The loss of his reputation as the premier European émigrés writer presented Nabokov with a challenge he was ready to face. As he describes it in his afterword to Lolita, “It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced with the task of inventing America.” With this weaker form of expression, Nabokov imbued the mundane elements of American life and its landscapes with a sense of wonder which transcends borders. Inventing this new world simultaneously connects Nabokov and his readers to all the memories of things past, to the values and experiences we hold dear. Nabokov transformed the external and internal struggles of immigration into a gift, an opportunity to be in a place where the wonder of everyday life lives on, mixing everything we treasure in the old and the new into a sublime unity.
Basil Bob is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bob27@cornell.edu.
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