Alfred de Musset, Vladimir Nabokov: The Invention of Exile
p. 77-88
Texte intégral
1The subject of Vladimir Nabokov’s relationship with and attitude toward Alfred de Musset (1810-1857) has attracted considerable scholarly attention. By drawing on existing scholarship, familiar evocations of Musset in Nabokov’s writing, and hitherto unknown instances of Nabokov’s engagement with Musset, I seek to expand our knowledge of the Nabokov/Musset nexus. An attentive, receptive and sympathetic reader of Musset since his early youth onward as well as the poet’s Russian translator and re-translator, Nabokov, in “Mademoiselle O,” mentions him in a rather disparaging context, yet a closer reading of this and other relevant texts reveals Nabokov to have been dependent on Musset for articulation of some pertinent notions relating to his own stance as writer and thinker.
2What was the raison d’être of the original, French, version of “Mademoiselle O” (1936)? This detailed, vividly drawn verbal portrait of the memoirist’s Swiss governess is as much an exercise in autobiographical introspection as one of the earliest attempts on his part to present and define his relationship with the French cultural—which is to say “literary”—tradition. The focus on the figure and life of the essay’s grotesque, pathetic protagonist affords its true subject, the author, a unique opportunity to woo his new target audience, and in the process of doing so, shape its response to himself. It should not be forgotten, of course, that this essay was to pave Nabokov’s way to the world of French letters by effectively launching his Francophone career; Nabokov clearly intended to ensure that if he were to do it, he would do it on his own terms, as befitted the accomplished writer that he had already become.1 In full accord with this objective, in “Mademoiselle O” he sets out to achieve something much more ambitious than what he had done with the miniature “Les écrivains et l’époque” in 1931: he proceeds to create one of his numerous alter egos, his fictional plenipotentiary in the world of French literature. This is a stranger, a foreigner with a strong, well-defined native identity, on the one hand; he has firm, deeply ingrained, personal ties to French literature, on the other. He is an outsider highly capable of conjuring up a universe of his own invention using his exceptional, aristocratic Russian past and his intimate, if markedly willful, appreciation of French literature. To put it somewhat differently, on the pages of “Mademoiselle O” the reader witnesses the birth of “V. Nabokoff-Sirine,” the start of his career as a French—or perhaps even “extraterritorial,” as George Steiner would attempt to designate him many years later—man of letters. What exactly is this fascinating newcomer’s point of departure?
3In an early prefiguration of the discord initially preventing Timofey Pnin from establishing an emotional connection with Victor Wind during their face-to-face interaction, literature, poetry, could have, but did not become a reliable “channel of communication” via which Mademoiselle might have found a way to the imagination of the most intransigent of her Russian charges. Already as a child, the author had no patience for the conventionality so perfectly epitomized by Mademoiselle’s uncritically received literary tastes:
Mais ce dont je me souviens en toute netteté, c’est le culte exceptionnel que [Mademoiselle] vouait à Corneille et à Racine […]. Moi, barbare, ami de Rabelais et de Shakespeare, j’ai toujours eu en grippe et Corneille et Racine, pour leur banalité parfaite, idéale—pour cette sublimation du lieu commun d’où résulte un chef-d’œuvre de fausseté. Leurs meilleurs alexandrins me remplissent la bouche comme un bon gargarisme et ne font point appel à mon imagination. Je déteste leurs chevilles, la pauvreté de leur style, la servilité de l’adjectif, l’indigence de la rime,—tout enfin,—et je ne donnerais pas un seul sonnet de Ronsard pour tout leur théâtre.
(“Mademoiselle O,” 167)
4Indeed, Mademoiselle’s Neo-/Pseudo-Classical predilections could hardly have found a submissively receptive audience in a precocious boy whose heroes were Rabelais, Shakespeare and Ronsard, and Nabokoff-Sirine’s reader cannot fail to register the eloquent undertones of this juxtaposition. Mademoiselle’s sterility is mirrored by her unimaginative tastes; Nabokoff-Sirine’s fertility is directly related to some of the most ribald, unbridled, and fecund imaginations of the European Renaissance. This is a statement of purpose, this is a promise of many a rich and strange work to spring forth from a creative source directly linked to all that is unconventional and original.
5It should be noted that in this regard Mademoiselle, for all her inability to break free of her monoglot cocoon, differed little from the vast majority of comparably insulated Russian counterparts whom she tended to consider with apprehension. Indeed, thanks to his upbringing, Nabokoff-Sirine was equally removed from his aesthetically backward fellow countrymen. François Coppée, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Sully Prudhomme, those darlings of his less worldly compatriots, had never presided over his adolescence; Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé were the tutelary deities of his insubordinate, independent, youth—after all, it overlapped with the brief, but extraordinary flowering of the Russian Symbolist school, which was directly influenced by its French forefathers:2
« Le vase brisé » de Sully Prudhomme […] et les Nuits d’Alfred de Musset avec leur lyrisme sanglotant et débraillé sont des exemples typiques de ce que ce genre de lecteur russe aimait en fait de poésie française. Par contre, dans le milieu où j’ai grandi, la tendance littéraire était d’un autre ordre, et ce n’est pas Coppée ou Lamartine, mais Verlaine et Mallarmé qui prirent soin de mon adolescence.
(“Mademoiselle O,” 166)
6Amplified as it is by its appearance in the company of irredeemably outmoded literary reputations, Nabokoff-Sirine’s dismissal of Musset, of the “tearful, disheveled lyricism” of his once popular (melo-) dramatic verse narratives, may have been intended to be taken at face value in 1936; when examined through the optics of our contemporary knowledge of Vladimir Nabokov’s career in letters in its entirety, it presents itself in a different, intriguing light.
7As Jane Grayson has demonstrated in her groundbreaking study of the Nabokov-Musset nexus, the debt that Nabokov owed Musset was considerable: “[Musset’s] was the ‘mask’ that Nabokov first adopted to tell of emotions and experiences which touched him most nearly and which were to remain the mainspring of his creative activity” (Grayson, 613). There is, however, every reason to believe that the effect of Nabokov’s encounter with Musset during the formative stages of his creative development may not have been studied in exhaustive depth, and while Grayson’s contention that “Nabokov was to set Musset aside and employ other models for his intellectual and artistic constructions of biography and memory, Proust for one” (614) may hold its value, the magnitude and endurance of Musset’s presence in other spheres of Nabokov’s artistic enterprise continues to invite and reward renewed scrutiny.
8There is sufficient ground to suspect that the very same epithet that in the context of “Mademoiselle O” connoted some of the less-than-appealing qualities of Musset’s lyricism was in fact indicative of a much more nuanced relationship with and attitude toward the French poet. Unexpectedly, the validity of this declaration is supported by a closer reading of another familiar text, the essay “On Hodasevič.” Also written in the first-person, it intentionally projects a different kind of authorial presence than the one at the center of “Mademoiselle O”; those who find it profitable to interpret Nabokov in terms of his being a chiefly playful writer, a Huizingan Homo ludens, may find it difficult to countenance a Nabokov who chooses not to engage in a game of masks, while opting for a solemnity only occasionally interspersed with sardonic irony. It is notable that Musset should be a link connecting two such dissimilar texts.
9Not merely a tribute to a fallen comrade, Nabokov’s eulogy of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) is a contemplation of the lot of the exiled artist, and as such it is closely integrated into an entire web of hotly contested notions pertaining to the status of émigré literature, its ability to give voice to the unique experience of Russian culture in the diaspora. Composed and published on the eve of the author’s departure from Europe, it effectively became Nabokov’s farewell to the émigré world that witnessed his ascent to success and maturity.
10Nabokov praised Khodasevich not only by asserting that the late poet was “Pushkin’s literary descendant in Tyutchev’s line of succession” (Strong Opinions, 223), he revisited some of the most contentious issues of a long-lasting polemic that saw Khodasevich—and, naturally, his protégé and ally Nabokov—square off against their mutual enemy Georgy Ivanov, who was supported by the “Parisian school” of writers headed by its semi-official maître and Ivanov’s literary comrade-in-arms Georgy Adamovich.3 Without naming any names, which would have been neither necessary nor appropriate in the wake of Khodasevich’s death, Nabokov tacitly upholds his late friend’s stance on the problem of suffering in its relation to art and refuses to accept Adamovich’s and Ivanov’s claim that contemporary poetry can no longer aspire to Pushkinian ideals of harmony between content and form—an ethos which both Khodasevich and Nabokov shared and defended. No matter how difficult the lot of exiled Russian writers and poets, they had no right to succumb to despair. On the contrary, their suffering must compel them to creation at a time when they are living in an atmosphere of complete freedom of self-expression unknown not only to their Soviet colleagues and contemporaries, but unprecedented in the annals of Russian intellectual history at large. Poetry, therefore, must not be permitted to be turned into a “human document”; no matter how perilous may be their condition, poets have no excuse for giving up their striving for formal perfection. Deliberately shocking in its descriptions and subject matter, Georgy Ivanov’s “prose narrative poem” Disintegration of the Atom (1938) became the most articulate and extreme expression of the “Parisian” doctrine, according to which all aspirations to harmony amounted to “the most sublime form of banality.”4 Citing the example of Khodasevich’s life and work, Nabokov insists that no social upheaval, no civilizational cataclysm may dislodge art from its position of supremacy over a base preoccupation with “humanity” or “the human condition”—a position that had become a public point of disagreement between Khodasevich and the “Parisians” on the eve of Khodasevich’s death in 1939. At one particular junction in Nabokov’s recapitulation of what may be termed the most salient constituent of Khodasevich’s credo, Nabokov introduces into his argument a French phrase:
To speak of his masterstvo, Meisterschaft, “mastery,” i.e. “technique,” would be meaningless and even blasphemous in relation to poetry in general, and to his own verse in a sharply specific sense, since the notion of “mastery,” which automatically supplies its own quotation marks, turns thereby into an appendage, a shadow demanding logical compensation in the guise of any positive quantity, and this easily brings us to that peculiar, soulful attitude toward poetry in result of which nothing remains of squashed art but a damp spot or tear strain. This is condemnable not because even the most purs sanglots require a perfect knowledge of prosody, language, verbal equipoise.
(Strong Opinions, 227)
11Unwilling or unable to trace this phrase to its source, contemporary Russian editors and annotators of Nabokov’s works simply translate it.5 Upon closer inspection, however, what may appear a fugitive Gallicism turns out to be a pointedly specific literary reference, one leading to an important subtext that amplifies and enriches the meaning of the eulogy, while disclosing a significance that is uniquely Nabokovian.
12The phrase “purs sanglots” came to Nabokov from Alfred de Musset, a poet who had become his trusted Parnassian interlocutor in his early adolescence. Exuberant creativity, inventive poetry as the single most effective way of coping with sadness, despair and artistic infertility is the central theme of “La Nuit de mai” (1835), the opening dramatic verse narrative in the cycle of Musset’s “nuits” (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit d’août,” and “La Nuit d’octobre”). In “La Nuit de mai,” a quaintly and transparently allegorical Muse vainly tries to move a dolorous Poet to writing. It is here where she asserts the primacy of art over the vicissitudes of life by underscoring a paradoxical situation in which suffering becomes poets’ saving grace, giving them a unique opportunity to convert pain into abiding art—and greatness:
Rien ne nous rend si grands qu’une grande douleur.
Mais, pour en être atteint, ne crois pas, ô poète,
Que ta voix ici-bas doive rester muette.
Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.
(Musset, 308; emphasis added)
13By introducing Musset’s “purs sanglots” into his tribute to Khodasevich, Nabokov shows that even though Khodasevich has departed, his position in the argument with the “Parisians” will not be surrendered. Contrary to their assertions, the Pushkinian line of Russian literature, poetry, is far from over; it has not been rendered obsolete by the dehumanizing effect of modernity on creativity as it was understood by the seemingly outmoded thinkers and artists of the Romantic age; it is far too early to be trying to find the “last,” “most important” and least artful words suited to the expression of ultimate verities, as dictated by the prevailing tenor of the “Parisian” school, which sought to promote itself as a closing page in the history of Russian culture. Our awareness of the implications of this pointedly specific reference to Musset brings into sharper focus Nabokov’s opposition to the “Parisians’” desire to subjugate art to life. It is not simply a manifestation of pessimism the logical continuation of which is silence—a point most fittingly illustrated by the denouement of “La Nuit de mai,” which depicts the Poet’s failure to rise to his Muse’s ennobling challenge—it is a display of pusillanimity most unbecoming true artists in general and the poets of the Russian diaspora in particular. There can be little doubt that here Nabokov does not merely show his solidarity with Khodasevich, he formulates a considered personal opinion, expressing a deeply held conviction pertaining to a fundamental principle of his own stance as writer, artist and thinker, an imperative that set in motion his own creativity. This was an empowering force that continued to compel him to creation even amid some of the most discouraging, traumatic experiences that he himself had to overcome in order to remain true to his calling.
14Nabokov’s published translation of “La Nuit de mai” of 1927 makes it clear that he had thoroughly internalized Musset’s formulation of the sentiment expressed in his eulogy of Khodasevich; in Nabokov’s version the French poet’s reflection on the redeeming and exalting power of suffering finds a close foreign-language equivalent. Nabokov’s Russian variant is carefully chosen, it clearly is a result of a contemplation driven as much by the translator’s desire to stay as close to the original as possible, as by his intention to capture and express his individual understanding of the sentiment in question:
Чье горе велико, тотъ истинно великъ.
Но если ты позналъ страданіе, не думай,
что долженъ ты, поэтъ, немотствовать угрюмо.
Чѣмъ горестней напѣвъ, тѣмъ сладостнѣе онъ.
Есть пѣсни вѣчныя,–рыданій чистый звонъ.
Č’e gore veliko, tot’’ istinno velik’’.
No esli ty poznal’’stradanie, ne dumaj,
čto dol’žen’’ty, poet’’, nemotstvovat’ ugrjumo.
Č’ěm’’ gorestnej napěv’’, těm’’ sladostněe on’’.
Est’ pěsni věčnyja, – rydanij čistyj zvon”.
(“Majskaja noč’”; emphasis added)
15Nabokov’s individual understanding of what constitutes eternal art (“istinnoe veličie,” “večnye pesni”) and its relationship with extra-artistic reality appears to have been informed by his long-lasting engagement with Musset, as testified by his efforts on perfecting his close Russian replicas of “La Nuit de mai” (1927) and “La Nuit de décembre” (1914 and 1928). The crystallization of Nabokov’s notions in this sphere, their verbal articulation, was likewise assisted by his exposure to Musset. It is nonetheless remarkable that in his eulogy of Khodasevich Nabokov chose to cite Musset directly, as if acknowledging that the French poet may well have found the most perfect expression of a sentiment that was so close to Nabokov’s heart. As “Mademoiselle O” demonstrates, the fact that Musset’s lyricism represented a decidedly obsolete mode in the development of French literature did not escape his attention; the critical mass of Nabokov’s repeated evocations of Musset, his translations and re-translations of Musset’s poems into Russian, however, serve as best evidence of Nabokov’s ability to discern and celebrate the aspects of Musset’s legacy he considered both timeless and consonant with his individual convictions. Another important instance of Nabokov’s engagement with the poet who should be counted among the most consequential among his French paragons is introduced and discussed below.
16It would not be an exaggeration to say that Nabokov’s reputation is synonymous with exile. It is one of his favorite subjects, a trusted source of inspiration, and a defining trait of his individuality. Amplified by his polylingualism, in Nabokov’s writing the subject of exile is intricately interwoven with the theme of linguistic displacement that early enough in his career acquires dimensions unmistakably philosophical and metaphysical in their volume and significance, fully justifying Edward Said’s assigning Nabokov a position of prominence in his gallery of twentieth-century writers “unhoused in or dislodged from any single language” (Said). Given the omnipresence of this subject in Nabokov’s work, would it be futile to query when, how and under what circumstance he began to conceive of himself as an exilic artist? For all its outward simplicity, the answer to this question may be far from obvious.
17Understandably enough, in Speak, Memory Nabokov reminisces that exile began tormenting him already in the Crimea, on the first leg of his flight to the West:
Suddenly I felt all the pangs of exile. There had been the case of Pushkin, of course—Pushkin who had wandered in banishment here, among those naturalized cypresses and laurels—but though some prompting might have come from his elegies, I do not think my exaltation was a pose. Thenceforth for several years, until the writing of a novel relieved me of that fertile emotion, the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of my love. (Speak, Memory, 596)
18Yet experiencing exile does not automatically make one a quintessentially exilic artist, poet and writer, something which Nabokov was to the marrow of his bones—in contrast with Ivan Turgenev, to cite but one relevant precedent. Our initial question, therefore, remains unresolved: when, how did Nabokov realize that he was to become a poet and writer of exile? And, perhaps still more urgently: when, how does the language of exile enter Nabokov’s vocabulary, become his natural idiom? I would like to argue that Musset played a crucial role in this development by proving to be an indispensible facilitator of Nabokov’s self-determination, while translation provided him with a medium uniquely suitable for the conveyance of concepts and lexemes greatly significant for his future work.6
19The Vladimir Nabokov Papers in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, preserve another document pertaining to the writer’s long-standing dialogue with the author of Les Nuits. It is his Russian version of “Rappelle-toi (vergiss mein nicht). Paroles faites sur la musique de Mozart” (1842). Nabokov’s translation is dated “1-VIII-19” (see Album 19: 33, 35; VNP, NYPL), which means that together with his translations from Seamus O’Sullivan and Walter Savage Landor it belongs to his brief sojourn in London where he stayed prior to entering Trinity College, Cambridge University (Boyd, 165-166).7
20Musset’s poem is a thoroughly competent exercise in creating a short lyric centered on the motif of lovelorn despondency, expressed in a tightly controlled, almost formulaic, poetic utterance. It consists of three stanzas comprising lines of varying length united by a single rhyme scheme (ababccddd). Each of the three stanzas begins and ends in a passionate appeal to the poem’s anonymous addressee: “Rappelle-toi.” The author of the German lied that inspired Musset is unknown, and, contrary to the subtitle of the French poem, its musical setting is not by Mozart (Musset, 820-21, n1). In Nabokov’s version, however, Musset’s poem is brought to life by the translator’s desire to instill it with a meaning that is intensely personal—a feature that may be obscured by Nabokov’s careful replication of the many characteristics of the poem’s compositional façade, such as the anaphoric beginning and the epistrophic conclusion of each of the three stanzas and the overall rhyming scheme. The wording of the original poem’s second stanza contains a clue as to why it might have appealed to Nabokov at a specific moment in his life, at a particular stop in his exilic itinerary:
Rappelle-toi, lorsque les destinées
M’auront de toi pour jamais séparé,
Quand le chagrin, l’exil et les années
Auront flétri ce cœur désespéré ;
Songe à mon triste amour, songe à l’adieu suprême!
L’absence ni le temps ne sont rien quand on aime.
Tant que mon сœur battra,
Toujours il te dira:
Rappelle-toi.
(Musset, 419-420)
21In Musset’s poem grief (“chagrin”) and the eternal separation inflicted on two suffering people by the fates (“les destinées/[m]’auront de toi pour jamais séparé”) are aggravated by exile (“l’exil”). It is hard to dismiss the impression that Nabokov’s version of the same stanza focuses on the circumstances of his personal predicament, placing the suffering protagonist at the center of the fragment’s composition:
О вспомяни, когда насъ рокъ мятежный
разъединитъ; когда въ чужомъ краю
устану я, бездомный, безнадежный,
отъ непогодъ, – о вспомяни мою
печальную любовь, послѣднее прощанье.
Кто любитъ – для того, что время, что изгнанье!
Пока не смолкнетъ сердца звонъ,
тебѣ твердить все будетъ онъ:
о вспомяни…
(Shvabrin, 123-124)
O vspomjani, kogda nas’’ rok’’ mjatežnyj
raz’’edinit’’; kogda v’’ čužom’’ kraju
ustanu ja, bezdomnyj, beznadežnyj,
ot’’ nepogod’’, – o vspomjani moju
pečal’nuju ljubov’, poslědnee proščan’e.
Kto ljubit’’ – dlja togo, čto vremia, čto izgnan’ e!
Poka ne smolknet’’ serdca zvon’’,
Tebě tverdit’ vse budet’’ on’’:
O vspomjani…
22As was the case with his rendering of the poem’s opening stanza, here Nabokov chose not to replicate the stock classical allegories of the original (in the translation Musset’s “l’Aurore craintive/[o] uvre au Soleil son palais enchanté” [ll. 1-2] have been sacrificed in favor of more vivid, if perhaps less exalted, images: “…kogda okno cvetnoe/drožaščij den’nad mirom raspahnet’’), the adverse fates mentioned in the opening line of the second stanza have given way to a “rebellious fate” (“mjatežnyj rok”) responsible for the pitiful state of the protagonist who anticipates finding himself in an “alien corner of the world” (“kogda v” čužom’’kraju ustanu ja, bezdomnyj, beznadežnyj, ot’’nepogod’…”—Nabokov is solely responsible for the introduction of this complex description, which in the translation replaces another French platitude—“ce cœur désespéré”). The feminine plural form of the masculine noun “destin” is one more classical allegory among the many found in the French original, whereas the Russian phrase employed in its stead contains a transparent reference to the circumstances that had forced the poet into “exile”: the “rebellious fate” of the translation points in no ambiguous terms to what Nabokov would later dub “that trite deus ex machina,” the Russian revolution. Through Musset’s mediation, one of the key concepts of Nabokov’s oeuvre in its entirety—“l’exil”/“izgnanie”/“exile”—enters his vocabulary as a conscious reference to the translator’s own predicament in recognition of the fact that his separation from his homeland may be lasting, if not eternal. A stark awareness of his English banishment had clearly called for a name that would be expansive enough, capable of encompassing the enormity of the traumatic, if ultimately empowering, transition that Nabokov was undergoing. It was no accident that the word “exile” (“izgnanie”) acquires the status of one of the most frequent token attributes of Nabokov’s writings in 1919 and onward, yet Musset’s assistance in finding a fitting poetic term for defining this exiled poet’s plight proves to have been crucial.
23Nabokov’s version of “Rappelle-toi,” with its frank expression of the translator’s own predicament, was never published. He went on to invent his own, highly personal version of exile, using this notion as a remarkably rich source of inspiration. His Russian transposition of “Rappelle-toi,” however, must have made him aware of the potential of a theme that had already manifested itself in his earlier works, both original and translated. While, true to the retrospective account given in Speak, Memory, Nabokov may have sensed the “first pangs of exile” already in the Crimea, it was in London where he came to a full awareness of his separation from his homeland, which he, together with so many of his fellow expatriates, initially considered to be a temporary distraction.8 Our knowledge of the implications of this realization for Nabokov’s art at large elevates the status of “O vspomiani,” his version of Musset’s “Rappelle-toi,” to that of a major precedent text, a catalyst that prompted a significant development in Nabokov’s self-determination as a writer of exile.
24Would it be going too far to suggest that Musset may have always remained as dear to Nabokov as Flaubert and Proust? It would hardly be an overstatement to say that Musset was certainly as useful to him as these giants of the French literary tradition in the long run. Nabokov’s affinities with French literature were varied and many, the results of his engagement with his French paragons were lasting and far-reaching indeed. As scholars pay attention to the undeniably strong presence of Flaubert and Proust in his individual reference field, they may also do well to cast their nets wider, to pursue the echoes that continued to reverberate throughout Nabokov’s writing even many years after his coming into contact with the likes of Pierre Louÿs, Jean Richepin or Émile Verhaeren. The instances of his failure to comprehend some of them—as was the case with Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon, the significance of which for the crystallization of some of Nabokov’s most deeply held convictions remains a sizable blind spot in our knowledge of the writer—are every bit as important to our understanding of the evolution of Nabokov’s aesthetics, ethics, and poetics as the examples of his ability to see his Parnassian interlocutors eye to eye, to understand, interpret, and, inevitably, internalize some of their most elusive images. Far from everything is known about his dialogue with the poets he considered his French confreres, such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine; there is much to be added to our ongoing conversation concerning Nabokov’s French and Francophone contemporaries. In some instances such a conversation has yet to start properly, as is the case with Jules Supervielle, whom Nabokov admired as both a poet and a person and whose compact novel Le Voleur d’enfants (1926) he may have found of considerable interest and perhaps even usefulness for some of his most consequential compositions.
25All the richness and variety of Nabokov’s ties to French literature, all the exciting and illuminating discoveries that still await those delving into the complexity and depth of his affinity with French culture, must not be permitted to eclipse one simple fact about his literary career, no matter how unglamorous it may appear in comparison with Nabokov’s links to other, much more substantial and durable literary reputations. Having encountered Alfred de Musset early in his youth, quite possibly even in his childhood, Nabokov never stopped feeling a certain partiality toward the author of Les Nuits, “Rappelle-toi,” “Lettre à M. de Lamartine,” and “À Julie,” a poet to whom he owed a good deal as both artist and thinker. To the extent to which the initial, French, version of his memoir of his Swiss governess deals with the subject of Nabokov’s intimate familiarity with French literature, it may be said to be one of the most unusual self-portraits in the history of world literature. In “Mademoiselle O” an impressive variety of the author’s personal literary tastes is distributed among different characters, all of whom are responsible for giving an artful, yet paradoxically accurate, impression of Nabokov’s own predilections.
26All this does not mean to suggest that Nabokov was somehow disingenuous when he spoke of his aversion to Corneille and Racine or his early allegiance to Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Ronsard. Contrary to a superficial impression, however, few of Nabokov’s French models exerted such a strong gravitational pull as did Musset. Originating in the earliest stages of his career in letters, Nabokov’s interest in the French poet left a discernable mark on some of his mature works. In this respect Ada’s example seems particularly relevant: Mlle Larivière’s partiality to Musset may appear to be unimaginative and retrograde at first, yet when a moment comes for a significant shift in the novel’s tonality, Nabokov once again refers to a source that on so many occasions proved to be supremely valuable to him:
I had a schoolmate called Vanda. And I knew a girl called Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see that bit as the purest sanglot in the book? What is the worst part of dying?
(Ada, 464; emphasis added)
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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10.1515/9781400884032 :Couturier, Maurice. (2011): Nabokov ou la Tentation française. Paris, Gallimard.
Grayson, Jane. (1995): “The French Connection: Nabokov and Alfred de Musset. Ideas and Practices of Translation.” Slavonic and East European Review 73/4, p.613-652.
Hagglund, Roger. (1985): A Vision of Unity: Adamovich in Exile. Ann Arbor, Ardis.
Ivanov, Georgij. (1994): Sobranie sočinenij v treh tomah. Moscow, Soglasie.
Livak, Leonid. (2003): How It Was Done in Paris, Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.
Musset, Alfred. (1957): Poésies complètes. Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (translation dated 1-VIII-19): “Rappelle-toi (vergiss mein nicht). Paroles faites sur la musique de Mozart” (1842). Album 19, p.33, 35; VNP, NYPL.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (November 20, 1927): “Majskaja noč’. Iz Al’freda de Mjusse.” Rul’2122, p.3.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1936): “Mademoiselle O.” Mesures 2/2, p.145-172.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1996): Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited [1966]. In Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951. Ed. Brian Boyd. New York, The Library of America, p.359-635.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1972): Strong Opinions. New York, Vintage.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1969): Poems and Problems. New York, McGraw Hill.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1996): Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle [1969]. In Novels 1969-1974. Ed. Brian Boyd. New York, The Library of America, p.I-485.
Nabokov, Vladimir. (1999): Sobranie sočinenij russkogo perioda. 5 vols. St. Petersburg, Simposium.
Pichova, Hana. (2001): The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press.
Said, Edward. (August 1, 1971): “A Deft Jumble of Cultural Correlatives.” The New York Times. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/03/specials/said-steiner.html
Shvabrin, Stanislav. (2007): “Vladimir Nabokov as Translator: The Multilingual Works of the Russian Period.” Ph. D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Notes de bas de page
1 For an authoritative assessment of Nabokov’s chances of becoming “one of the finest stylists of twentieth century French literature” see Couturier, 28.
2 A similarly dismissive attitude is on display in Ada, where the novel’s eponymous heroine sneers at her governess Mlle Larivière’s literary tastes (Ada, 55).
3 For Nabokov’s evaluation of the “dreary drone of the anemic ‘Paris school’ of émigré poetry,” see Nabokov 1969, 14 and also Chapter Fourteen of Speak, Memory (599-608); for convenient surveys of the Khodasevich/Nabokov vs. the “Parisians” debate, see Hagglund, 41-61 and Boyd, 350-351, 369-371 and 508-510.
4 “[G]armonija, k kotoroj stremitsja [iskusstvo], ne čto inoe, kak nekaja verhovnaja banal’nost” (Ivanov 2, 19).
5 See Nabokov, Sobranie 5, 588 and 782-83, where the phrase is translated as “sincere sobs” (“iskrennie rydanija”).
6 There is no shortage of studies examining the ways in which Nabokov’s exilic experience is reflected in his writing (see especially Hana Pichova, The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, and, in part, Leonid Livak, How It Was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré literature and French Modernism). To the best of my knowledge, however, exile has never been approached as a problem of Nabokov’s language.
7 For a discussion of this translation’s attribution and dating, see Shvabrin, 122-126.
8 Cf. a similar realization experienced by Martin Edelweiss in Glory.
Auteur
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Stanislav Shvabrin
Étudie et enseigne l’histoire et la culture des diasporas russes, la théorie de la versification comparée, la poétique et la politique de la mémoire nationale, la traductologie. Outre ses recherches et son travail éditorial sur Vladimir Nabokov, il a publié des études sur Georgy Ivanov, Andrei Kurbsky, Mikhail Kuzmin et Marina Tsvetaeva. Shvabrin est Edith Lewis Bernstein Fellow à l’Institute for the Arts and Humanities de l’Université de Caroline du Nord, à Chapel Hill. Il enseigne au sein du département des Langues et Littératures germaniques et slaves.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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