1An impressive array of writers in the 20^th century—Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman), Luis d’Antin van Rooten (Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames), E. M. Koster (The Dissertation), Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine), Mark Dunn (Ibid: A Life), Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)— have shown us how suggestive, demanding, and instructive works composed of text and commentary or narratives punctuated by footnotes can be. Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the most famous in this regard. The one thing everyone knows about his Pale Fire is that its annotations threaten to displace an ostensible subject and reorient readers around a new, hyper-subjective critical centre. Like the books on the above list, Pale Fire is a work of fiction, even though it challenges us to define what we mean by such a claim. A set of equally famous annotations constitutes a major part of Nabokov’s edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Here he deals with a genuine original, attempting to produce hyper-accurate translation and a commentary that educates readers concerning the details of Pushkin’s world. This makes it different in kind from the works listed above, but Nabokov’s footnotes are so fascinating that his edition of Pushkin’s great poem is often included in this amorphous category of footnote-punctuated narratives.1 In what follows I want to explore the strangeness of this commentary, which is not a fiction, but is devoted to a fiction that itself serves as a commentary on all sorts of literary questions. In my argument, I will suggest that even when or perhaps precisely when the annotations in Nabokov’s Onegin seem as oblique as Kinbote’s, as irrelevant as Zemblan politics, as cryptic as a message scribbled in the dark, they deserve to be read with care.

2More specifically, I want to muse about what Nabokov was seeking to achieve in his treatment of the ubiquitous references to French literature in Pushkin’s great verse novel, besides providing readers of Eugene Onegin with a crib. In the first section, I consider these references in general terms. Nabokov tells us a lot about three literatures in such comments: French and Russian, of course, but also Nabokovian, that is, his own richly idiosyncratic habits of reading and assessing. In the second section, I take up the specific treatment of Voltaire. He is judged very harshly at times, for some obvious and not so obvious reasons; however, Nabokov’s commentary suggests that, despite all the nay-saying, Voltaire’s literary presence in Pushkin’s poem is something with which readers should conjure in the end.

3Nabokov’s translation is first and foremost a Russian/English affair, an attempt to work out a new understanding of how the “into” language can be related to the “from.” But it is also a monumental exercise in the exigencies of exhaustive annotation and creative commentary. Here, Nabokov’s third language figures prominently. The explanatory notes indubitably establish him as an authority on an impressive range of subjects, French literature among the most important. The myriad entries devoted to it help us understand where Pushkin’s poem comes from and how formidable his erudition in French actually was (his classmates called him “The Frenchman” at school). As Volpert notes: “Pushkin’s ties with French tradition are exceptionally rich and diverse; the tremendous breadth of such interaction, which includes nearly one hundred names, distinguishes the poet from any other Russian writer” (458). Nabokov’s commentary on this interaction also contains an intriguing set of reference points, with their own revealing assertions and admonitions, their own commentary on the complexities of subjective judgment. In the end, the relevance of what a multitude of French writers—poets, translators, novelists, philosophers, literary critics—wrote in the years preceding the poem’s publication makes French as important a language for this version of Eugene Onegin as Pushkin’s inimitable Russian and Nabokov’s fiendishly precise and provocative English.

4Nabokov clearly loves his subject—well, a good deal of it anyway. He praises Chateaubriand to the skies, speaks highly of Constant’s Adolphe, and greatly admires Senancour’s Obermann. He fills the entries with biographical and literary critical data, useful details about figures Pushkin alludes to in passing, but Nabokov’s practice of singling out such writers for special mention is strategic as well as tactical. The immediate goal of the commentary is to acquaint students with certain names that they can safely assume are universally recognized as canonical; its ultimate goal is to give his readers the sense that the essential things that they need to know to understand Pushkin’s poem are the contents of the four volumes they hold in their hands. They must know that their guide, for all his witty asides and tart humour, is masterly, authoritative, unerring, and they must believe that what he is offering is not so much an informed judgment as a quasi-eternal truth.

5Consider the three writers just mentioned. They are poles apart in political terms: Chateaubriand is a Catholic conservative, Constant one of Europe’s first liberals, Senancour a critic of religion from a secular humanist point of view. All three are routinely associated with the rise of Romanticism in France, yet Nabokov is not particularly interested in linking them in such a generalized way. However, we would do well to remember that they each made an important contribution to the psychological novel in the form of an autobiographical memoir or collection of letters; they each write lucidly and evocatively about the effects of genuine passion on the sensibility of the solitary; they are particularly gifted at articulating the nature of the nostalgic feelings in the hearts of their heroes. These three writers, then, are mentioned so prominently and praised so enthusiastically to prepare us for seeing Eugene Onegin inscribed in a number of important traditions, important for both Pushkin and Nabokov.

6Then there are the poets. Nabokov compliments Parny on Les Poésies érotiques, describes Musset as colourful and witty, and says laudatory things about André Chénier’s work. Here again he follows his beloved Pushkin, who adored Parny, for example, and once described him as his master. Pushkin shares with Musset (and Nabokov, for that matter) a scepticism about the motivations and usefulness of politicians and a fondness for romantic ironies and their effect on self-perception. As for Chénier, Pushkin wrote a tribute to him as the proud symbol of the poet as hero and martyr, one who shows “the possibility of writing visionary poetry in which the poet’s prophetic claim derives from his own genius or the power of subjectivity” (Kahn, 191). Nabokov even enthuses about Bichat, a French doctor and researcher of genius, but not someone normally thought of as a great writer. What matters, then, is an interest in how passion functions in the world and the skill to write clearly and insightfully about one’s passion. Great poets like Pushkin will find what they can in such writers and immortalize them intertextually. In other words, Nabokov is attempting to recreate a whole cultural universe that affected Pushkin’s thought and art, to illustrate part of the very process of artistic evolution.

7However, dozens of 18^th- and early 19^th-century French authors are different in kind from those cited above, and must be summarily consigned to the scrap heap of literary history. According to Nabokov, the era’s poets are hopelessly conventional, its translations (from languages ancient and modern) appalling, its novels a bore, its conventions outdated, its ideas mere commonplaces, its ultimate irrelevance assured. Some examples: Pierre-Jean Béranger’s style is “journalistic” (III, 353). Ulric Guttinguer’s novel Arthur undistinguished, Sophie Cottin’s Mathilde “completely dead” (II, 342), Knyazhnin’s French models “more or less worthless” (II, 82), Pauline de Bradi’s full of “ridiculous French imitation[s]” (III, 153), Claude Dorat’s of stale Gallicisms (II, 251), Gabriel Charles de Lattaignant is a poetaster (II, 323) and Casimir Delavigne is “inept” (II, 182). At one point Pushkin mentions that Onegin likes to take Lamotte to read on his travels. Nabokov wonders aloud which Lamotte Pushkin had in mind (there are at least three possibilities), only to conclude that in the end it doesn’t matter, since every one of them is forgettably mediocre. Clearly this is Nabokov in full, “take no prisoners” mode.

8His comments on most of the figures to whom Pushkin refers and on whom he draws are mainly there to remind readers of the vagaries of literary history.2 Nabokov does not invite us to grapple with other possible views of these writers, but simply asks us to take note that their ephemerality has been sanctioned by the judgment of time. In his view they are part of the era’s background noise, once read with interest, now too insignificant to worry about, each a figure “than whom no one deserves obscurity more richly,” as Glenn Gould put it, in a wry allusion to an obscure 19^th-century French pianist/composer.3

9If it be objected that in composing this list I have concentrated on distinctly minor figures in French literature, it should be pointed out that a significant number of canonical figures are treated as unceremoniously. Corneille’s plays are “bombastic and platitudinous” (II, 83), Rousseau’s Julie “total trash” (II, 339), Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir “much overrated” (II, 90), Sainte-Beuve’s Joseph Delorme “derivative” (II, 154), and so on. In these annotations, then, Nabokov does a convincing imitation of the fox who knows many things, but also of the hedgehog who knows the difference between two big things: the insightful and the platitudinous, the original and the imitative, the living link and the dead letter.

10Such dismissive judgments of course figure prominently throughout Nabokov’s work. Skim the reviews from the 1920s or the lectures in Lectures on Literature and all sorts of similar examples turn up. The fact that this “all or nothing” mode of assessment is so widespread invites another potential objection: if Nabokov always had idiosyncratic views on other writers and loved to express them, then the expression of such views in his Onegin commentary has no special status. But the purpose of the catalogue that I have just enumerated is neither to break the news that Nabokov could be difficult to please, nor to serve as a prelude to waxing indignant about such pronouncements. Instead, I want to argue that some of these writers are more accomplished than he allows, that there is more to say about their inter-relations with Pushkin and Onegin, and—crucially—that Nabokov knows this perfectly well. The figures summarily derided in the commentary do not all occupy the same category in his mind, the slash and burn quality of the list is misleading, and the report of the death of some of these dead letters has been exaggerated.

11In places, in fact, this tendency to overkill, this polemicizing in cold warrior fashion with simulacra, sometimes threatens to elicit a sort of ghostly counter-narrative, in which the things most vehemently denied—Pushkin might have learned this from X, literature is a broad church in which works by Y and Z could be in dialogue with each other—reassert their importance in what might be seen as a return of the repressed.

12What has been repressed includes the multi-faceted quality of these figures who are banished so peremptorily and the importance of the roles that some of them have to play in Pushkin’s poem. Nabokov’s sense of how this novel in verse actually works is in effect on a collision course with the “gloating enthusiastic disgust” (Bend Sinister, 13) he enlists to demolish the writers who figure so prominently in the interstices of Eugene Onegin.

13It is important to point out that, even when Nabokov’s tone suggests the impossibility of disagreement, other points of view exist on these matters. Bitaubé’s translations of Homer are selling on Amazon for 1500 euros. Delavigne was considered by his contemporaries as “unsurpassed” and “unsurpassable.” Béranger was one of the 19^th-century’s most successful and influential poets, as well as one of its noblest figures, given the courageous defiance he showed in attempting to redress social wrongs during the reign of Charles X. As for the poor Lamottes, the case could be made for Onegin’s taking all three on that journey he was planning. François de la Mothe le Vayer was called the French Plutarch, compared favourably to Seneca, and pronounced worthy of taking his place between Montaigne and Pierre Bayle. Voltaire said of the extraordinarily prolific Houdar de la Motte that “As far as writers are concerned, he proved that one can still be important even if second rate” [“Il prouva que dans l’art d’écrire on peut être encore quelque chose au second rang”] (1835, 261). La Motte Fouqué was an enormously popular playwright and poet in the early part of the 19^th century, wrote Undine, a play still performed two hundred years after it was written, and acted as a major influence on E.T.A. Hoffman and Wagner, as well as on Zhukovsky and Pushkin (Rusalka).

14The most interesting treatment in this sense is that given Voltaire. Not only is he the largest target at which Nabokov takes consistent aim in the commentary but also he comes off the worst, edging out even the much maligned Madame de Staël, who is described as insipid, vulgar, “a poor observer” (II, 164) and—a couple of hundred pages later—“completely blind.” (II, 348).4 All Voltaire’s verses, the commentary solemnly informs us, are “abominably pedestrian” (II, 147). As a thinker he is “infinitely inferior” (III, 30) to Leibniz. As a critic, unlike (say) Pope, he deserves “ridicule” (III, 30) and his judgment of Rousseau is dismissed as “coarse” (II, 104). As a literary artist, he is a mere “topicist” (II, 85). As a dramatist, he is singularly untalented: e. g., his tragedy Tancrède is “worthless” (II, 182). As a figure in literary history, his particular brand of “romantic symbolism” (II, 90-91) had a bad influence on Stendhal. And so it goes.

15Some will see such criticism as a simple category mistake, a condemnation of Voltaire for being a poor version of something he never pretended to be. What would we make of a denunciation of Proust because in his fiction he does not say enough about urban development in the Hexagone, or refuses to speculate about the consequences of making education secular, obligatory and free in the Third Republic? Voltaire is usually praised for the very things of which Nabokov speaks disdainfully, for entangling “philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action”. He was no Leibniz, but then he never aspired to be. Rather he was a social thinker, distinguished for his understanding of liberty “between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism […] of contemporary Christian natural theologians,” for the thorough going scepticism that links him to figures like Montaigne, for his defense of empirical science against natural philosophy, and for the way his legacy constitutes “the alleged linkage that joined positivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantment and dechristianization on the other” (Shank).

16These are general ideas that help us understand how Voltaire redefined what it means for a philosopher to have general ideas. The sheer volume of his contribution to French literature and western culture is also obscured by Nabokov’s list. He is not so much larger than life as larger than literature: editions of his Collected Works are more massive than Tolstoy’s. Not many writers get to have an entire century named after them, as in “The Age of Voltaire.” Yet for Nabokov, this line of argument is ultimately an unsuccessful attempt at evasion. He firmly believes that the criteria by which a given work of literary art is judged are neither arbitrary nor subjective, but laid up in a pantheon for posterity to which he has special access. Hence his impatience with the cult of the overrated. This is also a reason that a lot of didacticists and popularizers have felt the lash of Nabokov’s sharp tongue.

17The biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky in Dar (The Gift) can help us understand better the treatment that Voltaire receives in parts of Nabokov’s commentary. One of the most interesting questions about that account of the 19^th-century Russian radical is why Nabokov has his hero Fyodor ignore all kinds of evidence that would change Chernyshevsky from plaster saint to human being: the diaries, the letters, the charming attempts to popularize whatever abstruse, scientific, anthropological, or political document he thought they should know about. A large part of the answer is the elaborate attempt of Lenin and his supporters to characterize Chernyshevsky as “the great precursor.” Faced with such a momentous claim, Nabokov’s political convictions militate against any temptation he might have to portray Chernyshevsky in a more sympathetic light. Operating with a formula like “The friend of my enemy is my enemy,” Nabokov has to depict Chernyshevsky as an ignoramus and buffoon, and Fyodor’s portrayal takes the satiric shape it does as a result. A politically motivated writer in Nabokov’s view simply cannot satisfy his aesthetic criteria, cannot even be considered as an important writer in light of those criteria.

18In large measure, Voltaire is selected for similar treatment because he too was so popular in the Soviet Union.5 Candide was read there as a hymn to the virtues of useful work and a dire warning to shiftless aristocrats. Tomashevsky insisted that Voltaire’s scandalous poem about Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, was a topical weapon for progressives everywhere. Lunarcharsky praised Voltaire’s anti-clericalism. Ivan Louppol, an eminent Marxist philosopher, wrote a preface to a 1938 edition of Voltaire’s work in which he credited the French genius with having played a key role in the education of the proletariat. Soviet critics celebrated the 150^th anniversary of Voltaire’s death (1928) by singling him out as the enemy of ignorance and thus one of history’s most potent freedom fighters. They celebrated the 160^th anniversary of his death by praising his authentic humanism and his defense of the realm of reason. The enemy of their enemy was their friend: the Catholic Church and the fascists burned Voltaire’s books; ergo, he was on the side of the workers against the reactionaries. Nabokov heard these tributes, sharpened his pen, and the sweeping antithetical claims were the result.

19However, at certain points he does offer his readers another Voltaire, Pushkin’s Voltaire as it were, not only by adducing the occasional parallel or by acknowledging an antecedent, but also by simply registering him as a presence. In fact, Nabokov mentions Voltaire and his work more than sixty times in the commentary, half again as often as he does Chateaubriand or Rousseau, for example. The fact that so many of these references are not just blistering denunciations or thunderous dismissals indicates how complex Nabokov’s views on this complex writer actually are.

20Nabokov quotes Pushkin to the effect that Voltaire shows us how satire should be thought of as serious literature, notes that a phrase from Voltaire serves as a possible source for Onegin’s epigraph, and points out that Voltaire may have influenced Pushkin’s epistolary inflections. At one point Nabokov also mentions a poem by a certain Yazikov in which Pushkin is described as a combination of Voltaire, Racine and Goethe (III, 309). Just seeing those names in the same sentence might have been expected to set Nabokov’s bile stirring, but he records in neutral fashion this reference to an august triumvirate and moves on.

21From an early age Pushkin saw Voltaire as nothing less than the avatar of French culture. He cites him some 250 times in his work. The reasons for this are manifold. The Decembrists were deeply indebted to Voltaire’s liberal ideas and said as much in great detail to the investigators seeking to discover the intellectual roots of their revolutionary convictions. Voltaire’s works were taught at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo where Pushkin went to school. A number of his youthful poems are clearly inspired by Voltaire, particularly those in which he amuses himself by ridiculing mediocre poets. He also translated a number of Voltaire’s short poems, making the sort of subtle adaptations possible for a translator with a particular sensitivity to the nuances of the originals. In a rough draft of Onegin, books by Voltaire occupy an important place in Onegin’s library. Pushkin made use of Voltaire’s “L’Essai sur les mœurs” when he undertook his study of the French Revolution. He saw important similarities between his difficulties with Nicholas I and the tempestuous exchanges Voltaire had with Frederick II. In a sense, then, all of Pushkin’s work devoted to Russian and European culture and politics in the 18^th century derives from Voltaire. He could be critical of his “grand maître”, in his comments on Voltaire’s naiveté vis-à-vis Catherine the Great’s autocratic regime, for example, or on Voltaire’s inability to free himself from Aristotle’s strictures concerning how tragedies must be written. But Pushkin is, in the main, relentlessly reverential in his attitude to his French forebear.

22Nabokov even goes out of his way to make Voltaire physically present for his readers, when he reminds them that in Chapter 6 of Eugene Onegin, “In the right margin [of the manuscript], alongside ll. 9-14, Pushkin drew a nightcapped profile of Voltaire, and […] another Voltaire, capless, lower down on the same page” (III, 416). We know from Eugene Onegin that notes in the margin can assist readers in better understanding the annotator, because when Tatiana looks at Onegin’s books, when she reads Onegin reading as it were, she makes that sort of contact with him. If Onegin’s character can be inferred by his marginal comments in the books in his library, if the mark left by a fingernail or a pencilled comment can enable readers to understand Onegin better, how richly significant might two actual drawings of Voltaire be?

23Of course a picture of a head is different from a description of one. As Valentine Cunningham points out in an essay on ekphrasis: “Writing is always tormented by the question of real presence, by challenges to knowability, by the problematics of truth and validity, the difficulty of being sure about what it might be pointing to outside of itself, by its deictic claims and desires” (65). Cunningham concludes: “The ekphrastic encounter seeks to resolve this ancient and continuing doubting by pointing at an allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness” (70). I think those faces in the margin function a little like ekphrastic objects, like the bronze horseman in Pushkin’s famous poem or the Grecian urn in Keats’s ode. And just as Nabokov’s translation is a portrait that hints at the existence of an original, so too is Voltaire’s face a portrait that shows us how he exists in the margin of Pushkin’s text, and in the mind of an admirer whom Nabokov in turn admires.

24The lines in Onegin beside which the first Voltaire head sits read as follows:

What was is gone, is nonsense [“vzdor”—Nabokov has “twaddle”];
The thing is that, ever since
In me my heart has grown cold,
Cut itself off from love,
And all within is empty and dark.6

25The ripple effect here is intriguing. The state of soul described in the lines is the direct consequence of an inability to feel passion, experience nostalgia, or even to see any value in it. The identification proposed is between what existed in the past and the meaninglessness of words that purport to represent the thing that is no longer present and can no longer be made present. Pushkin may have drawn those heads there to remind himself just how eloquent Voltaire is on precisely this subject. The emptiness that Onegin complains about here is strikingly like the mood that characterized the periods of exile that occurred throughout Voltaire’s adult life: the loneliness, the gloom, the sense of vulnerability.

26How significant is it that Nabokov carefully informs his readers about the juxtaposition of the Voltaire heads and these lines? The lines just happen to evoke one of Nabokov’s great themes, broached in an array of novels he wrote over almost fifty years. Such sentiments are clearly related to Ganin’s meditation on love and loss in Mašen’ka (Mary). One of the reasons he leaves his youthful love is that he can no longer feel for someone who has become a fiction, a story that he has told himself, one that served him for a time but has now become irrelevant. Kamera obskura (Laughter in the Dark) is another exercise in conducting the protagonist to a dark and loveless place, a tunnel at the end of the light, a place where words like pleasure and pain have lost their power to signify. Likewise for Hermann in Otčajanie (Despair): the story that he has been telling himself has come to an unexpected end, in another close place, one that threatens his very identity, since it reveals that he is, not an author of genius as he supposed, but a hopelessly isolated cuckold who has destroyed his own life. The same is true of the English novels. Lolita can be described in many ways, but the idea of characters “cut off from love”, of the ways that attempts to remember the past inevitably become memories of memories—all this is central to concerns raised in the novel. Ada’s Van Veen too is speaking across the years to the spectres that the figures from his past have become, and the intensity of his feelings of loss are inversely proportionate to the power of the intimacy occasioned by his ability to re-create them.

27The fact that, in a typical Nabokov novel, the protagonist is often bemused by the ways in which he is cut off from the past and its passions, comes up again in the Onegin translation, and again Voltaire and some subtle Nabokovian misdirection have important parts to play in the allusion. It begins with a comment on Madame de Staël. At one point Nabokov cites her suggestion that “It would be interesting to compare Schiller’s take on the loss of youth, in a poem called “Ideals”, with Voltaire’s” [“Il serait intéressant de comparer les stances de Schiller sur la perte de la jeunesse, intitulées ‘l’ Idéal’, avec celles de Voltaire”]. Nabokov’s response to this idea is as curt as it is unenthusiastic: “I have acted upon her suggestion,” he informs us, “but it is not intéressant at all; in fact, her observation is completely irrelevant” (III, 37).

28That sounds categorical, but why draw his readers’ attention to this possible link only to deny its importance? The more we look at the two poems, Voltaire’s and Schiller’s, in conjunction, the more we see that what Schiller is lamenting, even the imagery he uses and the semi-factitious respite he finds in hard work, is related to Voltaire’s moving account of what it is like to yearn for the capacity to feel a youthful passion: “If you want me to love again/ Give me back that time when love was possible” (“Si vous voulez que j’aime encore, / Rendez-moi l’âge des amours” (Voltaire, 1827, 429). The language in both conveys how time forces us to focus on the moments of our discontents while it rushes our pleasures by us almost unobserved. Voltaire’s willingness to settle for a compromise that is perforce unavailable—no one can “give back the time”—informs Schiller’s phlegmatic acceptance of the human situation. The German poet concludes by praising the virtues of creative work in much the same way that Voltaire ends by reminding us of our daily responsibilities. For Schiller, writing is work, a process of slow accretion, one that acts as a sort of stay against time. For Voltaire, the temporary antidotes to life’s bitterness are tenderness and illusion. By isolating those particular elements, the French poet sounds a note that is intriguingly similar to the ones struck by Nabokov’s most meditative characters in his fiction written more than two hundred years later.

29Have we caught Nabokov disguising another link between Voltaire and Schiller on the one hand, and his own aesthetic interests on the other, another link between them and Pushkin? Disguising is a strong word, a bit like cryptomnesia in a related context. Yet Nabokov surely deserves credit for facilitating all these conversations between works that he juxtaposes, even if he does it only to deplore or deny most of the French connections. He would of course continue to insist that his unequivocal judgments were the last word on the subject: Voltaire, Schiller, their lyric meditations on time passing, their sense that writing can give the illusion of keeping time at bay—none of these binds the four writers in question ineluctably to each other. And yet such links keep making us see that juxtaposing them is actually quite rewarding.

30When the translation was first published, many commented on the arbitrary and idiosyncratic quality of the commentator’s obiter dicta, particularly in such a venue. Nabokov may have been anticipating these reactions when he says in a note that “Scholarship without humility or humour is a basic type of pedantry” (II, 46). The point about humour is clear, but humility? Not perhaps the first word that springs to mind when one thinks of Nabokov’s Onegin commentary. Yet what if we take it to mean a sort of awe before the mystery of how Pushkin could have mined previous literature in such a successful way? According to this view, because he sees Onegin’s creator as such a kindred spirit, Nabokov often finds himself trying to understand how Pushkin might have understood these writers whom his spiritual descendant sees so differently. Nabokov’s thinking might have gone something like this: “Since the nature of influence and inspiration are so often incomprehensible, perhaps it is worth asking myself how a poet like Pushkin could have seen such writers as figures of importance. Maybe the curious ways mediocrity itself serves selective genius are worth musing about. Besides, my inability to comprehend these writers’ importance may actually serve as an obstacle to establishing the most profound rapport possible with my beloved Pushkin. After all, as a novelist and critic I too have been known to make complex use of writers about whom I have distinctly mixed feelings.” End of imagined soliloquy from an unauthorized romanticized biography.

31When this humbler mood is not upon Nabokov, the efforts at denigration redouble. If I’m right about this battle he likes to fight with himself, Nabokov’s description in the Onegin commentary of Cervantes, George Eliot, Mann, and Faulkner as mediocre writers, whose reputations have been inexplicably puffed up by academics incapable of recognizing genuine art, becomes another striking example of what we might call the Voltaire phenomenon. As a description of Cervantes et al., it is not particularly helpful, although it does give a whole new meaning to the idea of provocative eclecticism. The history of the novel as a genre, its origins, its dominance in the 19^th century, and its development in the 20^th would be hard to write if the colossal contributions to it of Nabokov’s gang of four were really just so much smoke and mirrors. The magician may have doubts on these writers, each arguably as important as Voltaire for the history of Western literature, but in the Onegin commentary he enjoys creating shadows of doubts, doubts about the doubts, and outlines of figures that silently salute each other, in the misty distance.