Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf

Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia WoolfPriscilla Meyer, Rachel Trousdale

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 50, Number 3, 2013, pp. 490-522(Article)

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comparative literature studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 2013. Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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vladimir nabokov and virginia woolf

Priscilla Meyer and Rachel Trousdale

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(You have so many writing women! Be careful—it’s a sign of a provincial literature (Dutch, Czech, etc.))

—Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Mark Aldanov

I gradually got used to his manner of . . . taking something from a great author and then saying he’d never read him.

—Nina Berberova, “Nabokov in the Thirties”

Nabokov did say he had read Woolf. In fact he claims to have read “all” of Woolf in 1933 in preparation for writing “The Admiralty Spire.”1 Yet the faults for which his story’s horrid narrator reviles “lady novelists” have nothing to do with either the subject, method, or stylistic devices of Woolf ’s novels.2 Nabokov finds lady novelists sentimental and famously wrote to Edmund Wilson, “I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.”3 Maxim D. Shrayer reviews Nabokov’s largely negative criticism of the works of Russian and anglophone women poets and prose writers, finding that he “fails to offer grounds for his dismissive remarks” about even such a poet as Marina Tsvetaeva.4

What led Nabokov to read all of Woolf ’s work but never anywhere to allude explicitly or covertly, except in his letter to Zinaida Shakovskaia, as far as we know, to one of the most important anglophone modernists publishing while Nabokov was studying literature in England? After all, by 1933 Woolf

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had written Jacob’s Room (1922), The Common Reader (1925), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), A Room of One’s Own (1929), and The Waves (1931), works that at the time were overturning the way prose fiction was written no less remarkably than Joyce’s Ulysses.5 Woolf ’s reputa-tion by the 1930s was too well established for him to treat her work as only representative of women’s (deridable) authorship.6

By the early thirties, Woolf was a major prose stylist whose novels expanded the boundaries of fictional form while exploring the intricate rela-tionship between memory, consciousness, and perception. Woolf ’s linguistic and formal experiments achieve a novelty and sophistication (and recogni-tion) Nabokov had not at the time yet matched. As we show, his covert use of her work reveals their shared interest in the complex interpenetration of personal memory and literary influence, of public history and private fate. At a time when he was an impoverished émigré known only to a small circle of Russians, Nabokov’s discovery that a woman was already engag-ing, with obvious success, in the kind of experiments he was interested in himself could help account for his dismissal of Woolf. His hidden readings of Woolf demonstrate his determination to maintain his vision of himself as sui generis, an artistic self-description that was daring, liberating, and somewhat overstated. At the same time, his suppression of Woolf ’s contribu-tion to his work suggests his resemblance to the angry male writers Woolf describes in A Room of One’s Own.

The dense referentiality that characterizes Nabokov’s fiction is one of the most important of his creative methods and takes several forms. Nabo-kov makes precise textual references (Pale Fire’s “bodkin” is a hyperlink to Hamlet, the soliloquy “To Be or Not to Be,” to Shakespeare’s life, work, and period, which he wants the reader to be well aware of ), which constitutes a subtextual mode. Whole plot lines have identifiable sources (Sally Horner’s real-life abduction by Frank Lasalle helps structure part 2 of Lolita) that carry with them their own cultural settings, forming an intertextual method. A third order of reference is the network of secondary texts “standing behind” an initial set of references, in which the system of references makes its own argument, establishing intratextuality.7 Cryptomnesia on this scale in the case of such a highly self-consciously referential writer as Nabokov is a wild hypothesis. There is another, more elusive category, a mode of referential-ity that refers to a looming invisible relationship, hidden in not-so-plain view, without detectable sub-, inter- or intratextual clues. Michael Marr, demonstrating Nabokov’s appropriations of Thomas Mann’s work in “The Potato Elf,” attributes Nabokov’s “contempt” and “scorn” for it to jealousy and resentment.8 In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Henry James’s short


492 C O M PA R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

stories provide, apparently unacknowledged, the theme of the writer’s ghost’s dialogue with his biographer.9 That book also incorporates several features from Virginia Woolf ’s novels. We could decide to view the appropriations in Sebastian Knight as part of a continuum of references to the Anglo-American literary tradition that the book seeks to enter, or perhaps Berberova is cor-rect in implying that the author’s failure to acknowledge a reference/source/subtext/intertext is a denial of influence motivated by rivalry. We show that Nabokov repeatedly draws on Woolf ’s work and make the case that tracing Woolf ’s hidden presence through some of its manifestations in his novels demonstrates not just her influence on his representations of consciousness and his experiments in fictional form but reveals his struggle to resist madness and despair through authorial control.

Nabokov was well aware of British literary circles, as Don Barton John-son shows in his article on Nabokov’s critique/translation of Rupert Brooke’s poetry.10 Nabokov’s “Rupert Bruk” was written in 1921 while he was at Cam-bridge; three years earlier Virginia Woolf had published “Rupert Brooke,” a review of Edward Marsh’s edition of Brooke’s poems, accompanied by his own memoir of Brooke.11 Her review, which rued Marsh’s romanticization of Brooke, was published anonymously, as was then the custom for book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement. But it was well known that Woolf and Brooke had been friends from childhood (starting in 1893, when they began seeing each other at St. Ives, in Cornwall), and literary circles were so small and closely knit that her authorial identity, like that of others, would be reasonably transparent. Although immersed in émigré grief, given his love of Brooke, the newly arrived Nabokov could not have missed the shaping of the epoch of British thought, art and letters by the Bloomsbury group’s activity in the early 1920s, but he apparently nowhere alludes to the group’s other members or their work.

At the very least, by 1933 when he read “all” of her works, Nabokov would have known that Woolf was a part of a group representing the most important contemporary artists and thinkers in British life. But aspects of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire indicate that Nabokov came to Woolf earlier and recognized in her work many of his own concerns.

Woolf was seventeen years older than Nabokov. Their first novels (The Voyage Out, 1915, and Mary, 1926) were published eleven years apart. Both writers, influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson, play with how novels convey the passage of time.12 Both came from prominent intel-lectual families with whom they spent idyllic summers, which they evoke repeatedly in their novels, and both lost a beloved parent at a comparatively



early age: Woolf ’s mother died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and Nabokov’s father was shot in 1922, when Vladimir was turning twenty-three. Woolf ’s brothers Adrian and Thoby attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and Woolf resented her exclusion from the intellectual life they found there. Nabokov also attended Trinity; as an émigré he felt like an outsider, and he had to make efforts to fit in. More unusually, in defiance of the prejudices of their surroundings, both married Jews.

The two writers share a concern with biography and autobiography; their fiction transmutes their lives in a modern way described by Woolf in her essay “The New Biography” (1927): “A method still remains to be discovered” by “the biographer whose art is subtle and bold enough to present that queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow.”13 The biographer should reconcile, without conflating, “granite” and “rainbow,” fact and imagination. Woolf ’s interest in how biography can and cannot capture an individual’s consciousness is influenced by the work of her father, Leslie Stephen, who edited the Dictionary of National Biography; Woolf ’s experiments in biography, both fictional and nonfictional, examine the relationship between the “granite” reported in the DNB and the actual experience of living. The related question of a person’s (especially an artist’s) relationship to his or her surroundings—to what degree historical period, “the spirit of the age,” determines self or creative genius—was crucial to both Woolf and Nabokov. And this concern causes both to mock Freudian psychology in their essays and novels.14

In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, V derides Sebastian’s biographer, Mr. Goodman, for depicting Sebastian “as a product and victim of what he calls ‘our time’”: “‘Postwar unrest,’ ‘Postwar Generation’ are to Mr. Goodman magic words opening every door,” pushing him to adopt a mechanistic cause-and-effect approach that leads him to call his biography The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight.15 V’s quest is for his brother’s “real” life, which he sees as lying in Sebastian’s sensibility: “Time for Sebastian was never 1914 or 1920 or 1936—it was always year 1” (63). Sebastian’s concern is to locate “a certain warm hollow where something very like the selfest of my own self sits huddled up in the darkness” (66–67). Woolf ’s portrait of a writer in Orlando, the only novel Nabokov singled out in his letter, calling it “poshlost’” (“kitschy pretension”), emphasizes the same writerly self-sufficiency: “So now she was darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called . . . a single self, a real self.”16 These portraits of the artist—in Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves and Orlando and in Nabokov’s The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire, to name only the



works we discuss—are at the center of the authors’ similar treatments of the nature of reality, death and immortality, and the nature of consciousness.

Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Orlando and Nabokov’s The Defense, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pale Fire feature divided consciousnesses that represent transmuted aspects of each author’s concerns: Woolf separates her domestic London self (as represented by the quite differ-ent Clarissa Dalloway) from her mad, suicidal self (as embodied in Septimus Smith) and separates her male and female selves in Orlando. Nabokov has his Russian persona (Sebastian) merge with his younger anglophone self (V) in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, attempting to reconcile the loss of Russia and its language; in Pale Fire he separates these into family loss (Shade’s daughter) and loss of country—its language and culture (Kinbote’s Zembla). Nabokov’s losses are so great that his oeuvre is preoccupied with preventing his pain from overwhelming his art. His early work (after Mary), criticized for its coldness, avoids sentiment and any hint of personal involvement; only as he becomes more confident in his art, starting with The Gift, where he tempers the loss of his father and country with the gain of his beloved and maturation of his art, does he allow his experience into his novels.17 In The Defense, however, he is still maintaining emotional incognito; Nabokov heightens the narrative distance from the hero that characterizes his early work, which distinguishes it from the “lady novelist’s” more empathic models.

Mrs. Dalloway and The Defense

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Defense (1929) share several elements of plot, style, and theme. Nabokov appears to borrow key plot points from one of Mrs. Dalloway’s narratives. The novels contain remarkably similar climactic moments: a scene in which a man kills himself by jumping out of a window. The suicides point to the novels’ shared philosophical concerns, particularly an interest in the First World War’s effects on its survivors. But the novels also differ significantly: Nabokov focuses his story only on Luzhin, who echoes elements of Woolf ’s Septimus narrative. The Defense lacks a coun-terpart to Mrs. Dalloway herself, focusing instead on how the hero’s suicidal madness stems from a desire to transcend reductive accounts of the place of the individual. In particular, Luzhin’s similarity to Septimus suggests that Luzhin’s escape from the “combination” arrayed against him is also an escape from the reductive, dictatorial “human nature” that hounds Septimus—and that both men’s suicides keep them from becoming mere victims of history.



In Mrs. Dalloway, the trauma of the war is the main cause of Septimus Warren Smith’s mental illness, which he experiences primarily as an inability to feel. Septimus survives the war physically unscathed, but the death of his friend Evans “just before the Armistice” leaves him oddly cold: “Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognizing that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime.”18 This inability to feel grief at Evans’s death causes him increasing distress. He proposes to his wife, Rezia, shortly thereafter, “when the panic was on him—that he could not feel,” as an attempt to jolt himself into an emotional response (85). This solution fails, and his illness gets worse; he begins to experience messianic delusions and, during his final breakdown, to have visions of the dead Evans.

“Not feeling” is Septimus’s self-diagnosis. It is apparent to the reader that he feels very deeply but that—like other characters in the novel, including Richard Dalloway, who cannot say to his wife “in so many words” that he loves her (115)—Septimus is unable to articulate his feelings, even to himself. Septimus’s madness is in fact an overflowing of feeling, a deep recognition of the beauty of life (“Men must not cut down trees. There is a God”) and the horror of death’s incursion into life (“Evans was behind the railings!” [24]). He weeps frequently in joy and distress, and he is overwhelmed with guilt at his own inadequate response to the joys and distresses of humanity.

Septimus’s suicide is a form of self-defense against his doctors, Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw. The unsympathetic Holmes has told Septimus that he is merely “in a funk” and has “nothing whatever seriously the matter with him” (21). Bradshaw is worse; he recognizes the severity of Septimus’s distress and yet diagnoses it dismissively as shell shock and prescribes a regime of bed rest that would separate Septimus from Rezia and leave him vulnerable to Bradshaw’s attempts at “conversion” to a sense of “proportion” (99).19 Both doctors’ diagnoses are reductive; they minimize Septimus’s mental illness and his self. Woolf, who underwent similar treat-ment for her own breakdown, considers this cloistering of the mentally ill horrifying: “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered him-self but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion—his, if they were men, Lady Bradshaw’s if they were women” (97).20

In his resistance to Holmes’s and Bradshaw’s opposite but equally damaging diagnoses, Septimus has the support of Rezia, who also sees that Bradshaw’s “cure” is really conformity. Rezia tries to help Septimus escape his madness by pointing out interesting things in the world around



them: “‘Look, look, Septimus!’ she cried. For Dr. Holmes had told her to make her husband (who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts) take an interest in things outside himself ” (21). But her greatest help to him comes in their final moments together, when they construct a hat to give to their landlady’s daughter. The couple’s collaboration is a return to the intimacy and normalcy Rezia treasures: “Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone together. Always she would like that hat” (141).

Paradoxically, this moment of liberatory happiness enables Septimus to take his own life. Septimus jumps out of the window of the Smiths’ lodging-house room in part to escape Holmes and Bradshaw, who intend to send him to a sanatorium but primarily to give “human nature” what it demands. He considers several means of suicide, rejecting each:

There remained only the window, the large Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing. (He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer’s area railings.

“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran to the window, she saw; she understood. (145–46)

Unlike the brutal Holmes, Rezia understands Septimus’s actions: we learn this not only from Septimus’s belief that “she was with him” but from her attempt, before Septimus’s suicide, to prevent Holmes’s entry and from the words “she understood,” which come after he is capable of providing the narrative perspective. Holmes’s judgment is clearly to be rejected in favor of sympathy with the dead man; later, Clarissa Dalloway will recognize Septimus’s suicide as “an attempt to communicate” (180). While Septimus intends his death as an atonement for his inability to feel, Clarissa under-stands it as an effort to preserve the self against the pressures of “conversion” and conformity. Septimus’s death is an alternative to the other great peril of the novel, the “death of the soul” (58); it preserves the essence of the individual at the expense of his body.



The suicide scene in The Defense is strikingly similar to the one in Mrs. Dalloway. Luzhin too jumps out a window in his rented lodgings. Like Septimus, he is impeded by the physical reality of the window: in this case, because it is stuck. Septimus considers in a flash “the tiresome, the troublesome, and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and throwing himself out” (149), but Luzhin’s death takes longer, emphasizing both the trouble and the melodrama. Luzhin first tries to jump out the lower half of the window, but the white-frosted pane is stuck; he smashes the pane and attempts to get through the hole, but he is stopped by shards of glass. Finally he climbs onto a chair and reaches the black upper half of the window. While this is going on,

there were voices behind the door. Somebody knocked. Somebody called him loudly by his name and patronymic. Then there was silence and his wife’s voice said with absolute clarity: “Dear Luzhin, open, please.” . . . A fist slammed against the door. Two men’s voices were quarreling and his wife’s whisper wriggled through the uproar. . . . He quickly reached up to the upper frame, now feeling that the thumping and the voices were urging him on and that he could not help but hurry. Raising a hand he jerked at the frame and it swung open. Black sky. Thence, out of this cold darkness, came the voice of his wife, saying softly: “Luzhin, Luzhin.”. . . Meanwhile the voices and the crashing behind the door had grown in volume, there must have been around twenty people out there—Valentinov, Turati, the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers . . . They were sniffing and grunting, and more of them came, and all together they were beating with something against the shuddering door. The rectangular night, however, was still too high. . . . After many efforts he found himself in a strange and mortifying position: one leg hung outside, and he did not know where the other one was, while his body would in no wise be squeezed through. His shirt had torn at the shoulder, his face was wet. Clutching with one hand at something overhead, he got through the window sideways. Now both legs were hanging outside and he had only to let go of what he was holding on to—and he was saved. Before letting go he looked down. Some kind of hasty preparations were under way there: the window reflections gathered together and leveled themselves out, the whole chasm was seen to divide into dark and pale squares, and at the instant when Luzhin unclenched his hand, at the instant when icy air gushed into his mouth, he saw exactly what kind of eternity was obligingly and inexorably spread out before him.21



The scenes share key elements: the hostile men trying to gain entrance, the sympathetic presence of the wife, the imagined presence of other, judgmental characters from the world of the book (“human nature,” Bradshaw, and Mrs. Filmer; “Valentinov, Turati, the old gentleman with the bunch of flowers”), and the brief pause halfway through the window.

More importantly, both suicides are motivated by metaphysics. Luzhin’s jump is an attempt to escape the “combination” of a chess game he believes is being played against him in life, a game that move by move is repeating patterns of earlier defeats; his suicide is an attempt to take a completely “unex-pected” direction unforeseen by his “mysterious opponent.” Like Septimus, who jumps to placate “human nature,” Luzhin’s death is his response to a metaphysical demand; both men believe themselves to be in dialogue with a superhuman force that challenges them and finds them wanting. While Septimus’s suicide is treated as a kind of self-preservation and therefore as a success, however, Luzhin’s appears to be a failure: the “inexorable” eternity of “dark and pale squares” below him indicates that Luzhin has not, after all, escaped the chess pattern that has pursued him throughout the novel. His more awkward, extended suicide emphasizes his difficulty in navigating the material world.

The resemblances between the two men extend beyond their deaths. Luzhin and Septimus encounter similar treatments for their mental illness. Like Septimus, Luzhin has a doctor who says nothing is the matter with him and prescribes a rest cure: “You have been sick but now you are well. Do you hear? You are quite well. . . . You must lie quiet. Rest. Get lots of sleep” (160). This doctor, too, has a benign appearance but a materialist understanding of his patients’ lives:

“Your father owned land, didn’t he?” Luzhin nodded. “Land, in the country—that’s excellent,” continued the professor. “You probably had horses and cows?” A nod. “Let me imagine your house—Ancient trees all around . . . the house large and bright. Your father returns from the hunt . . .” Luzhin recalled that his father had once found a fat, nasty little fledgling in a ditch. “Yes,” replied Luzhin uncertainly. “Some details,” asked the professor softly. “Please. I beg you. I’m interested in the way you occupied yourself in childhood, what you played with. You had some tin soldiers, I’m sure . . .” (163)22

Like Bradshaw, Luzhin’s doctor seeks to make his patient’s life conform to a familiar model, replacing the “nasty little fledgling” of reality with the stereotyped vision of a generic father returning from the hunt. Like Luzhin’s



in-laws, whose apartment is full of nostalgic Russian kitsch, the doctor offers a formulaic version of Russia in place of Luzhin’s real childhood memories. Bradshaw’s love of “conversion” and Luzhin’s doctor’s account of a Russian childhood replace the idiosyncrasy of individual experience with bland for-mulas. In each novel, the patient’s suicidal escape from his physician’s stric-tures is also a rejection of such simplistic worldviews in favor of a nebulous but potentially redemptive metaphysical realm—in Septimus’s case, a space in which the self can escape the imposition of conformity that Clarissa rec-ognizes in his death and in Luzhin’s case, an unknown supernatural beyond.

Like Rezia, Mrs. Luzhin repeatedly urges her husband to look at objects in the world around them. While in both cases the source of the instruc-tions is somewhat suspect, the wife’s affection is helpful, even though the objects to which she draws her husband’s attention frequently reinforce his madness: “So, thought Septimus, looking up, they are signaling to me” (21) when Rezia points out a skywriting airplane; Mrs. Luzhin fears to mention the names of large cities “in order to avoid any harmful reminiscences” (187).

Luzhin’s madness takes a quite different form from Septimus’s, however. Luzhin has no interest in the state of his own feelings and does not appear to react to any trauma; despite having lived through the 1914–1918 period in Europe, he seems bizarrely unaffected by the war and the Russian revolu-tion, which occasioned his exile from Russia. Mrs. Luzhin’s avoidance of city names is “a superfluous caution. The world in which Luzhin had traveled in his time was not depicted on the map” (187). We see his apparent immunity through the eyes of his father, as the latter contemplates how to write a novel based on Luzhin’s childhood:

Now, a decade and a half later, these war years turned out to be an exasperating obstacle; they seemed an encroachment upon creative freedom, for in every book describing the gradual development of a given human personality one had somehow to mention the war, and even the hero’s dying in his youth could not provide a way out of this situation. There were characters and circumstances surrounding his son’s image that unfortunately were conceivable only against the background of the war and which could not have existed without this background. With the revolution it was even worse. The gen-eral opinion was that it had influenced the course of every Russian’s life; an author could not have his hero go through it without getting scorched, and to dodge it was impossible. This amounted to a genuine violation of the writer’s free will. Actually, how could the revolution affect his son? (80)23



Nabokov both does and does not attempt to pull off the trick Luzhin’s father contemplates: his character appears to escape the “encroachment” of the war and the revolution but only as a result of madness and obsession. As Will Norman shows, the political events of the age lurk behind even Nabokov’s most apparently aloof novels; here, the half-hidden presence of the war provides both the motive for artistic freedom and a warning against solipsism.24 If Luzhin has survived the war without noticing it, it is he and not Septimus who experiences a failure of feeling. Luzhin is so isolated in his chess world that he seems barely to register his father’s death; his refusal to take his wife to visit his father’s grave suggests his refusal to confront and experience the loss to death and history of his parents, his childhood, and his country. Clearly Luzhin feels something—he is anxious about his chess game—but that is a measure of his obsession: he succeeds in avoiding all other emotions. In Luzhin, Nabokov imagines what it would mean to suffer from the illness with which Septimus diagnoses himself, examining the possibility that his own desire to escape the war’s overdetermination of life and art is solipsistic.

Luzhin also echoes Clarissa Dalloway in one paradoxical way, revealing not so much her presence as her absence: the most telling parallel between the characters is in the emphasis both novels place on their names. Clarissa, the title character of Woolf ’s book, is introduced in the novel’s opening line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself ” (3). This opening establishes through its use of her title and reported speech that she is a well-to-do married woman and at the same time hints at Clarissa’s thoughts on the relationship between her name and her identity: as she walks up Bond Street towards the florist, Clarissa “had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” (10). Clarissa’s public persona is impersonal, based more on her social position as the wife of a prominent man than on her character. But her private self remains and is recognized by her intimates: Richard thinks of her gratefully as “his Clarissa” when she understands his love for her despite his inability to speak of it (115), and the novel ends with her former lover Peter Walsh’s vision of her at her party:

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?It is Clarissa, he said.For there she was. (190)



The shift from Mrs. Dalloway in the opening of the book to Clarissa in the closing of the book encapsulates how Mrs. Dalloway moves from the outer to the inner life, beginning with Clarissa’s public identity and mov-ing to her consciousness—a course the novel also follows with many minor characters, whom we first glimpse from the outside and whose minds we then briefly enter.

Like Mrs. Dalloway, The Defense is bracketed by its main character’s name. The novel opens, “What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin” (15). As in Woolf ’s novel, we are introduced to the main character by his surname alone, in a manner indicating the character’s social position. Nabokov’s opening line is less transparent than Woolf ’s, and only after reading the rest of the paragraph can we understand that the initial emphasis on Luzhin’s name indicates his transition from young child to schoolboy. His new name marks a shift in his identity, which is also a kind of imposture: his father is “the real Luzhin.” Both names, then, indicate an identity that is both public and relational: “Mrs. Dalloway” implies the existence of a Mr. Dalloway, and the young “Luzhin” must seek to separate himself from “the real Luzhin.”

The Defense, too, ends on its main character’s first name: “The door was burst in. ‘Aleksandr Ivanovich, Aleksandr Ivanovich,’ roared several voices. But there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich” (256).25 The last lines of Nabokov’s novel parallel the ending of Woolf ’s not only in the emphasis on the main character’s given name but in the emphasis on that character’s presence or absence: “For there she was” and “there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich.”

“Clarissa” is present throughout Mrs. Dalloway; the novel’s perspec-tival and narrative shifts enable the two identities to coexist. By contrast, “Aleksandr Ivanovich” is not just missing from the room at the end of The Defense; he is also absent from the book as a whole. Throughout the novel, characters ask Luzhin what his name and patronymic are, and Luzhin never replies. He is nicknamed “Tony” at school, which he hates but does not protest against. His father, too, is never named, so we cannot extrapolate his patronymic. We do not learn Luzhin’s full name until after his death. While Clarissa lives life as “Clarissa” and “Mrs. Dalloway” simultaneously, there is no “Aleksandr Ivanovich”; Luzhin does not have multiple inner lives like Clarissa’s. His absence from the novel is a symptom of his obsession with chess: Luzhin, unlike the other characters in both books, has a single interest in life and thus a single way of experiencing it. The Defense’s opening and closing may echo Mrs. Dalloway’s, but to opposite effect: where Peter’s vision of “Clarissa” confirms her character’s multivalence and richness, “there was no Aleksandr Ivanovich” confirms the hollowness of Luzhin’s obsession.



Luzhin’s namelessness infects everyone close to him. His wife, too, lacks a first name: she is “his fiancée” and “Mrs. Luzhin,” and even her father cannot be named lest she acquire a patronymic. The lack of an Aleksandr Ivanovich emphasizes the difference between the humane Septimus and the empty Luzhin. While the war and its horrors are all too present with Woolf ’s returned soldier, Nabokov’s chess player suggests what the price of avoiding such horror might be: the very “death of the soul” Clarissa fears.

The Defense is unusual among Nabokov’s novels in having a variable narrative viewpoint. Most of the later English novels would have first-person narrators (Van in Ada; Shade and Kinbote in Pale Fire; Humbert in Lolita; the narrator of Pnin); other of the Russian novels like Invitation to a Behead-ing or The Gift, in which Fyodor, as a writerly consciousness, repeatedly shifts his own point of view into others’, are narrated from a single point of view. The Defense, by contrast, is narrated from several perspectives: the principal point of view is Luzhin’s, but we also enter the minds of his father and wife. While The Defense contains far fewer narrative viewpoints than Mrs. Dalloway, which repeatedly enters the perspectives of strangers on the street, the two novels use similar techniques for shifting from one perspec-tive or time period to another. In each novel, shifts in perspective take place around a pivot point: two characters will be looking at the same object or thinking of the same event, whereupon the narrative viewpoint shifts from one character to the other or from the present to the past via the description of their shared object of attention. This midsentence change of perspective is practiced by a number of modernist writers: similar narrative shifts are common in Ulysses, for example, which Nabokov admired for exactly such experiments. Woolf need not be the only source for it, but it is striking that in Nabokov’s novel, as in Woolf ’s, the shift takes place most frequently between observers—as in the scene in Mrs. Dalloway where passersby observe a motorcar and a skywriting airplane—although jumps in time also occur as characters remember their pasts.

Nabokov’s 1963 foreword to the English translation of The Defense directs us to one of these pivot points, the German resort Luzhin visits with his father:

Upon his recovery, a taller and thinner boy, he was taken abroad, at first to the Adriatic coast where he lay on the garden terrace in the sun and played games in his head, which nobody could forbid him, and then to a German resort where his father took him for walks along footpaths fenced off with twisted beech railings. Sixteen years later when he revisited this resort he recognized the bearded earthenware



dwarfs between the flower beds, and the garden paths of colored gravel before the hotel that had grown bigger and handsomer, and also the dark damp wood in the hill and the motley daubs of oil paint (each hue marking the direction of a given walk) with which a beech trunk or a rock would be equipped at an intersection, so that the stroller should not lose his way. (71)26

As quickly as that, sixteen years pass, and the narrative continues into a conversation—or at least Luzhin’s half of it—with the woman he will eventually marry. Like the trails through the beech woods, the narrative hits an intersection, and we abruptly leave the path of Luzhin’s prewar, boyhood wanderings for the even lonelier path of his postwar adult life.

The resemblance between the novels is great enough to suggest that Nabokov, writing—in Russian—in the spring of 1929 makes use of Woolf ’s 1925 text. Like the war, Woolf is visible in the background of The Defense. Her presence suggests the war’s covert importance, not as the false narrative of trauma suggested by Luzhin (or Septimus’s) doctor but as one of many tragedies the artist must transcend.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Jacob’s Room

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire treat forms of divided consciousness, the first between Nabokov’s Russian and anglophone autho-rial selves, the second between his Russian and American cultural universes. Sebastian Knight’s paired opposites achieve an ideal synthesis: the Russian writer dies and becomes the English one, assisting him from beyond the grave. The pairing in Pale Fire has the opposite, tragic, resolution: madness and suicide for the Russian persona, assassination for the American one. Both books profit from Woolf ’s work: Sebastian Knight employs Jacob’s Room for the stage setting of Cambridge and London and The Waves for the ending in which the characters gradually merge; Pale Fire mimics Woolf ’s survey of English history and literature and her use of the device of the comic index in Orlando.

In Sebastian Knight Nabokov casts his transition from Russian to English as a metaphorical death. Writing his first novel in English in 1938–1939 after his final one in Russian (The Gift), he struggles with the loss of both Russian language and culture as tools for artistic creation, a loss he overcomes by replacing his Russian “implied associations and traditions” with English



ones.27 In addition to direct references, Nabokov alludes to English poets (e.g. Brooke and Walter de la Mare) and American novelists (e.g., Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James) in order to create his own English medium, casting the anglophone universe as a linguistic afterlife in which he hopes to resurrect his Russian art.

Nabokov appears to have prepared to write his first English novel by reading widely in Anglo-American literature. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight refers to novels, short stories, biography, autobiography, poetry, plays, theological treatises, myths, legends, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, adventure tales, comic tales, boys’ illustrated magazines, monthlies, letters, newspapers and films. Almost all are written in English. The novel alludes openly to some of its materials; Nabokov highlights them in describing the range of the Russian Sebastian’s resources for his (and Nabokov’s own) transition from Russian to English.

The “musical phrase” V identifies on Sebastian’s bookshelf (Hamlet, Le Morte d’Arthur, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, South Wind, The Lady with the Dog, Madame Bovary, The Invisible Man, Le temps retrouvé, Anglo-Persian Dictionary, The Author of Trixie, Alice in Wonderland, Ulysses, About Buying a Horse, King Lear [39]) combines canonical British writers (Shakespeare, Malory), experimental fiction ( Joyce), popular authors Nabokov admired (Stevenson, Wells, Carroll), a few major Europeans (Flaubert, Proust, Chekhov), and college ephemera like The Author of Trixie to convey a sense of Sebastian’s university life through literature and simultaneously to create a miniature history of English fiction. Sebastian is apparently not reading the Bloomsbury authors, current in the Cambridge atmosphere though they were. Elsewhere Nabokov refers to John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, A. E. Housman, and Brooke but does not allude to Bloomsbury or Woolf, unless, as Siggy Frank suggests, “Nabokov ironically acknowledges his female colleague in the character of Sebastian’s English high-strung, neurotic mother Virginia.”28

The year Nabokov graduated from Cambridge, Woolf published Jacob’s Room (1922). The book presents the biography of a young man who dies at twenty-seven in World War I (Brooke died at war at twenty-eight). In the novel Woolf explores the question of how to convey Jacob’s life as faithfully as possible. Like Sebastian, Jacob is “at once character and ghost,”29 both present and absent throughout the novel.

In rendering Jacob’s portrait, Woolf draws details from the lives both of her brother Thoby and Brooke. Thoby died of typhus in 1906, the year that Jacob “goes up to Cambridge.”30 Brooke also went up that year and read classics and English, as Jacob appears to have done (and as Sebastian



does, who, unlike Nabokov, reads French and Slavic). Like Brooke, Jacob is another Cambridge-educated victim of the war.

Woolf recognizes the impossibility of truthfully representing not only all the talented British youths who died (indicated by Jacob’s surname Flanders) but any single one, even a less exceptional person than Brooke. The narrator of Jacob’s Room writes: “Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves . . .” (45). Woolf ’s method in Jacob’s Room is indirection: she assembles moments of Jacob’s life from early childhood until his death, seen from multiple perspectives—his mother’s, his friends’, his landlady’s. The credo of the book, the rejection of “character-mongering” (46) is repeated twice: “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done” (262). Fragmentary responses—“Distinguished-looking,” “Extremely awkward,” “A writer? . . . A painter?,” “So unworldly” (116–17); “He rode to hounds—after a fashion, for he hadn’t a penny” (264)— accumulate in a kind of chiaroscuro around Jacob but do not define him. “But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all. . . . Yet over him we hang vibrating” (120–21).

In addition to the impressions of his friends and acquaintances, Jacob, like Sebastian, is represented through two of his rooms: the first at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the second, the last place he inhabits, his flat in London. Section 3 evokes Jacob’s university years, introduced through the eyes of that random “elderly lady” arriving in Cambridge on the same train and concluding with Jacob returning to his room:

He went out into the court. He buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and being the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his footsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back from the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps, as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: “The young man—the young man—the young man—back to his rooms.” (73)

Woolf ’s modernist indirection puzzled critics, who complained that because she gives no psychological portrait, there is no possibility of reader identification with the hero. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s fictional character V uses Woolf ’s method to recuperate his equally fictional half brother’s life: he collects multiple viewpoints in attempting to capture



Sebastian’s essence. The important difference is that Sebastian is a published writer, so that V is able to use his novels to help construct his image, while Woolf makes do with hypothesized diary entries and letters for her compos-ite homage to Thoby and the casualties of World War I. The books mourn different orders of loss, but both are caused by historical cataclysm that the authors refer to minimally, insisting on the individuality of their characters.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Jabob’s Room are more similar in their treatment of their central characters than The Defense and Mrs. Dalloway, as each asks us to work out the interiority—absent but intuited—of their dead subjects. Nabokov brings more empathy to Sebastian than to the dangers of obsession personified in Luzhin, in part because Sebastian is explicitly part autobiographical (same birth year but not birth date, etc.); the novel provides Nabokov a means both of describing and distancing himself from his “personal tragedy” of losing the Russian language.

Sebastian has died two months before his brother V sets out to col-lect material for his biography. V’s narrative moves backward in Sebastian’s biography from his visit to Sebastian’s London flat shortly after his brother’s death (chapter 4) to his trip to Cambridge (chapter 5), where V tries to reconstruct Sebastian’s university years, beginning with Sebastian’s arrival to the same place, although different court, as Jacob: “As he entered the stately gloom of the Great Court with gowned shadows passing in the mist and the porter’s bowler hat bobbing in front of him, Sebastian felt that he somehow recognized every sensation, the wholesome reek of damp turf, the ancient sonority of stone slabs under heel, the blurred outlines of dark walls overhead” (41).

The Russian Sebastian’s recognition of the scene comes from his reading. Sebastian’s first impression, apparently given through his eyes, can only be hypothesized by V in his narration. Like the unidentified, impersonal nar-rator of Jacob’s Room, he tries to capture Sebastian’s life, thoughts, experience and essence in retrospect. The reminiscent, distant tone of both narrators’ accounts of their subjects’ Cambridge years is intensified by the fact that Sebastian and Jacob are dead, absent from their rooms, their pasts, the narra-tors’ lives; as a kind of mock eternity, Cambridge remains eerily unchanged.

V is able to find Sebastian’s friend, now himself a don, fifteen years after Sebastian’s graduation, who tells V that “his tutor, the late Mr. Jef-ferson, had been . . . a mighty dull old gentleman, but a fine linguist” (48). V is more indulgent of Trinity’s unchanging ways (perhaps because he is less excluded) than Woolf, who, having left Jacob’s room, goes on to mock the dons: “Poor old Huxtable can’t walk straight;—Sopwith too has praised the sky any night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same



stories. It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning, since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti’s on the wall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or rusty pipes), how priestly they look!” (61–62).31

Woolf conveys Jacob’s Cambridge life in part by describing the books in his rooms, as Nabokov does for Sebastian. The bookshelf in Sebastian’s London flat is an emblem of the novel’s theme: it characterizes a British university graduate in the first third of the twentieth century, hinting at the apprenticeship Nabokov has assigned himself as he prepares to enter the anglophone tradition.

The device of the bookshelf for characterization is used by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) to describe Leopold Bloom and by Osip Mandel’stam to render his family history in his autobiography The Noise of Time (1925). There is overlap among the four bookcases in question—all have Shake-speare; Bloom and Mandelstam have something Russian; Bloom and Jacob have Spinoza—but Joyce and Mandel’stam are not characterizing a British university student. Bloom’s bookcase is seen in his mirror and is framed by the image of inversion; the scene concludes with Bloom’s thoughts about “the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females”; the portrait of Mandel’stam’s bookcase in chapter 4 evokes the theme of conflict and overlay among languages and cultures (Hebrew, Russian, German), reflect-ing several decades in the life of a whole family.32 Woolf describes a book collection much closer to Sebastian’s, one that calls up the life of one young Englishman at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1906:

There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Dukes of Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faerie Queene; a Greek dictionary with the poppies pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans. . . . Then there were the photographs of the Greeks, and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all very English. The works of Jane Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one [sic] else’s standard. Carlyle was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual text-books. (60)

In contrast to Mandelstam’s linguistic, cultural, and historical layerings, Jacob’s books are “all very English”; his Cambridge university education in the classics has a British inflection. Like Sebastian’s shelf, Jacob’s collection



has “very few” French books. It also has a book about horses: Jacob’s Diseases of the Horse is matched by Sebastian’s About Buying a Horse. The first is an American book by Sydenham Benoni Alexander (1840–1921)—there is a 1911 reprint of the original 1892 edition in the British Library. Sebastian’s About Buying a Horse (1875) is by the Punch editor Francis Cowley Burnand, from his series Occasional Happy Thoughts. Nabokov replaces Jacob’s practical item with a comic, literary piece.

In 1922 the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press began publishing Russian works in Samuel S. Koteliansky’s English translation, from Avvakum to Gorky, and Woolf began writing essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Briusov, and the Russian revolution in 1917, but Jacob has no Russian literature in his room. Sebastian’s shelf has one Russian work, but in English translation, Chekhov’s “Lady with the Dog.” Woolf discusses this story in The Common Reader (1925) in her essay “The Russian Point of View,” in which she deplores the loss suffered by reading Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov in English:

Our estimate of their qualities has been formed by critics who have never read a word of Russian, or seen Russia, or even heard the language spoken by natives; who have had to depend, blindly and implicitly, upon the work of translators.

What we are saying amounts to this, then, that we have judged a whole literature stripped of its style. When you have changed every word in a sentence from Russian to English, have thereby altered the sense a little, the sound, weight, and accent of the words in relation to each other completely, nothing remains except a crude and coarsened version of the sense. Thus treated, the great Russian writers are like men deprived by an earthquake or a railway accident not only of all their clothes, but also of something subtler and more important—their manners, the idiosyncrasies of their characters.33

Thus the inclusion of “The Lady with the Dog” (and not “Dama s sobach-koi” as one might expect of a native speaker of Russian) on Sebastian’s shelf opens out via Woolf ’s essay to a moving depiction of Sebastian’s condi-tion—deprived by a politico-historical earthquake of precisely what Woolf enumerates.

Jacob’s “deference to some one else’s standard” is represented on Sebas-tian’s shelf by the Anglo-Persian dictionary, presumably a remnant of Clare’s study of Eastern languages, just as the presence of Jane Austen on Jacob’s shelf hints at an absent female source. Jacob has “all the Elizabethans”; Sebastian’s shelf begins and ends with two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.



The ending of Jacob’s Room evokes Jacob’s absence by describing his London rooms, where his friend Bonamy and Jacob’s mother are sorting his things:

“He left everything just as it was,” Bonamy marvelled. . . . “All his letters strewn about for any one to read.”

Bonamy took up a bill for a hunting crop.“That seems to be paid,” he said.There were Sandra’s letters. . . .Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain;

the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair creaks, though no one sits there.

. . .“What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?”She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes. (302)

The London rooms are linked to Jacob’s Cambridge room by the paragraph that begins “Listless is the air . . . ,” which first appears following the enu-meration of his books and photographs of the Greeks (60–61). Both rooms are actively empty of Jacob.

V visits Sebastian’s small flat at 36 Oak Park Gardens for the first time after his death. Books, photographs, a painting, letters, clothing are to be expected in the rooms left by the literate dead. Sebastian’s two photographs are of a Chinese execution and relate to some unknowable idea of his own; Jacob’s Greeks are part of his Cambridge education. V describes Sebastian’s clothing in odd detail, hoping for something to be revealed about his brother:

Half a dozen suits, mostly old, were hanging in the wardrobe, and for a second I had the odd impression of Sebastian’s body being stiffly multiplied in a succession of square-shouldered forms. I had seen him once in that brown coat; I touched its sleeve, but it was limp and irresponsive to that faint call of memory. There were shoes too, which had walked many miles and had now reached the end of their journey. Folded shirts lying on their backs. What could all these quiet things tell me of Sebastian? (34–35)

Like Jacob’s empty, useless, and totally inanimate shoes, Sebastian’s para-lyzed clothing is his husk, now shed—an instantiation of his absence. The two scenes include the mothers: the talc-powder tin “standing there alone” in Sebastian’s bathroom evokes his dead British mother Virginia Knight



through the violets “figured on its shoulders” (35); Jacob’s widowed mother helplessly gathers his things.

In both rooms, the furniture is more animate than the former inhabit-ants—Sebastian’s armchair “folding its arms resumed its inscrutable expres-sion” (35); Jacob’s creaking wicker chair “creaks, though no one sits there” (302). V finds the two sets of letters Sebastian asks him to burn from Clare and Nina; Bonamy finds Jacob’s letters from Sandra.

V sees out Sebastian’s study window “a view of the back-garden or park, the fading sky, a couple of elms, not oaks, in spite of the street name’s promise” (35); Bonamy looks out Jacob’s window on London street life, “and then suddenly all the leaves seemed to raise themselves. ‘Jacob! Jacob!’ cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again” (303). In Sebastian Knight, Bonamy’s cry of loss (“Jacob! Jacob!”) is encapsulated in the window view of “a couple of elms, not oaks”: this is Nabokov’s way of underlining his own metaphorical death, his exile from Russia and his past, from Vyra, where the “avenue of oaklings . . . seems to have been the main artery of my infancy.”34

The trees out the window will continue their cycle of life and death, though the addressees of the letters, the readers of the books, and the wearers of the clothes are gone. The empty rooms evoke their dead and the pain of the living who mourn them.

Jacob’s Room refuses to draw a psychological portrait. Jacob represents and immortalizes a collectivity of precious individuals in World War I. Sebastian Knight adds the Russian dimension to Jacob’s Room and similarly rejects indi-vidual psychology in favor of a more allegorical identity; Sebastian, alive in V and in his five novels by the end, embodies the losses (country, language) caused by that same war and the Russian revolution it helped to trigger.

Woolf presents the life history of one individual in Jacob’s Room; in The Waves (1931) she renders a collectivity, tracing the lives of seven friends from their childhood to their sixties.

Bernard, the writer character who, like Sebastian and like Nabokov himself, cannot help noticing irrelevant details instead of the foreground action, takes a trip to Rome, aware that he is beginning “a new chapter” of his life: “Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is, ‘Bernard is spending ten days in Rome.’”35 In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, we hear the writer Sebastian’s personal voice only once, in his letter to V, written—significantly—in Russian. V renders it in English: “I am fed up [osskomina] with a number of torturous things and especially with the patterns of my shed snake-skins [vypolziny] so that now I find a poetic solace in the obvious and the ordinary which for some reason or other I had overlooked



in the course of my life” (183). Sebastian, like Bernard, lives in London, but writes his letter from Paris, not Rome. He is dying. The Russian word “vypolziny” means “that which has been crawled out of.” While snakes do this regularly, the snake is not implicit in the word, which can apply equally to insects; the noun (“vypolezn”) can refer to a person who emerges from hiding or darkness. Returning to his native Russian family and language as he is dying, he, like Bernard, is shedding his life skin, coming out of hiding into another world, understood literally (physical body) and metaphorically (the Russian language).

At the end of the book, Bernard, now an “an elderly man, rather heavy, grey above the ears” looks down “from this transcendency,” and achieves a new understanding of his part among the six friends whose lives he and the book have traced:

And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt, “I am you.” (288–89)

V has a similar realization in the final sentence of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone neither of us knows” (203). The merging of Sebastian and V is motivated by Nabokov’s desire to have his “dead” Russian writerly self inform his newly fledged English one. Like Woolf ’s septet of friends, Sebastian and V have shared a life story that comprises the book, whose end must bridge the divide between the living and the dead.

The parallel Cambridge/London rooms and the detail of the life skin/snakeskin in the context of the merging of the character(s) and narrator(s) in Nabokov’s first English novel suggests that his training for it included Woolf ’s work. He shares her mystical interest in transcending the boundary between the living and the dead, as well as in the problem of life writing: how can one know, let alone faithfully represent, the life of another? V’s ability to render a more “real” life of Sebastian comes from his empathy for Sebastian and his books, whose characters uncannily pursue him on his quest. The reader has even greater access to their shared reality than V, confirming both Nabokov’s dictum that reality is a word that can only be used in quotes and Woolf ’s question in “A Room of One’s Own,” “What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable” (120).



From the outsider’s view, rendered through Mr. Goodman’s biography and quotations from critics of his work, Sebastian is simply a writer living in London. V’s realer “life” adds Sebastian’s Russian youth, the loss of his mother and his father at a young age, his perilous escape from the Bolsheviks, his university isolation, his reading, the interplay of his life and his art. Nabokov adds a layer to Woolf ’s multiple sources for Jacob’s as-real-as-possible life, the process of V’s quest, which itself carries another layer—Sebastian’s uncanny intervention in the quest, of which V is only dimly aware when he concludes that he and Sebastian are one. The writer Bernard’s mystical unity with six friends in The Waves and Woolf ’s evocation of Jacob’s rooms and death add a lyrical empathy to the Henry James plot of ghostly literary intervention that allows Nabokov to convey the pain of his loss without drawing too intimate a self-portrait.

Orlando and Invitation to a Beheading

Woolf ’s Orlando: A Biography recounts the three hundred and fifty-year-long life of Orlando, from his birth in the reign of Elizabeth I, to the present day (11 October 1928); Orlando inexplicably turns into a woman while serving as the British ambassador to Constantinople for Charles II. The book is as much a “biography” of England, its history and literature, as of its hero/ine.

In his letter to Shakhovskaia, Nabokov called Orlando “a first-class example of poshlost’.”36 In Invitation to a Beheading he parodies Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree” in the novel Cincinnatus reads in his cell, Quercus. Twenty-four years later, Nabokov again turns to Orlando, creating in the homosexual Kinbote in Pale Fire a (distant and partial) refraction of Woolf ’s bisexual hero/ine, whom she modeled on her lover Vita Sackville-West.

Nabokov and Woolf treasure the beauty of life in its everyday detail. Nabokov expressed this in the 1924 “Beneficence” (“Blagost’”), an early short story, and Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway the same year. Yet both also use the meta-phor of life as a prison, Nabokov in Invitation to a Beheading (written in 1934 in Berlin) and Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway. Peter Walsh summarizes Clarissa Dalloway’s view of kindness: “Let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushion” (77). The prison metaphor also governs Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. The furniture Cincinnatus’s family brings with them to his cell (like Clarissa’s “flowers and air-cushion”) is emblematic of the conditionality of our physical existence. But we can transcend our



limited experience of what Cincinnatus calls “our whole, terrible, striped world” through nature (91).

The oak tree, an ancient image of nature’s transcendence of human life, has personal meaning for Woolf and Nabokov: Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree” and Cincinnatus’s prison library novel Quercus (“oak tree” in Latin) begin in real beloved oaks at family estates—Vita Sackville-West’s Knole and Nabokov’s Vyra.

Orlando suffers from the “disease of reading” (75) that gives rise to the disease of writing; by the time he is twenty-five he has produced a raft of mythologically titled plays, histories, and romances, all of them representing the outworn genres of his age. His poem is his only genuine work, based on actual observation of the world instead of literary conventions. After he is jilted by his Russian princess, he burns all his works except “The Oak Tree,” which he continues writing.

But as he scratched out as many lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning. . . . For it is for the historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. (113)

Throughout, Orlando carries the manuscript of her poem in the bosom of her shirt: “She had been working on it for close on three hundred years now” (236). At the end of the novel, when Orlando is thirty-six, the manu-script falls out of her dress at coffee with the poet Sir Nick Greene, who arranges to publish it. The poem wins the “the Burdett Coutts’ Memorial Prize”: “Fame! Seven editions. A prize” (312). (Here Woolf parodies her own literary success—Angela Burdett-Coutts sponsored soup kitchens, temperance societies, and drinking fountains for dogs, but no literary prizes.)37

Orlando returns to her estate and goes to the tree that inspired her poem: “The ferny path led . . . higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life ” (324). Orlando intends to bury her book under the oak as a tribute to it, “a return to the land of what the land has given me” (324) but realizes that writing poetry is “a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice” (325) and so leaves her book unburied. The moral of the tale is that “the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy. . . . Orlando had so ordered it that . . . she need neither fight her



age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself ” (266), which her unburied poem demonstrates.

In Invitation to a Beheading Nabokov’s description of “the famous Quercus” parodies “The Oak Tree’s” schematic encapsulation of English literary history, Woolf ’s modernism, and Woolf ’s fame, substituting the tree’s development for the growth of Orlando’s poem:

The idea of the novel was considered the acme of modern thought. Employing the gradual development of the tree . . . the author unfolded all the historic events—or shadows of events—of which the oak could have been a witness; now it was a dialogue between two warriors dis-mounted from their steeds—one dappled, the other dun—so as to rest under the cool ceil of its noble foliage; now the highwaymen stopping by and the song of a wild-haired fugitive damsel; now, beneath the storm’s blue zig-zag, the hasty passage of a lord escaping from royal wrath; now upon a spread cloak a corpse, still quivering with the throb of the leafy shadows; now a brief drama in the life of some villagers.

It seemed as if the author were sitting with his camera somewhere among the topmost branches of the Quercus, spying out and catching his prey. Various images of life would come and go, pausing among the green macules of light.

. . . Among other things, there was a detailed list of all the initials carved in the bark with their interpretations. And finally, no little attention was devoted to the music of waters, the palette of sunsets, and the behavior of the weather.

. . . This work was unquestionably the best that his age had pro-duced. (123)

The ages of history alluded to are rendered in clichés—highwaymen, a fugitive damsel. But if the intention is to parody “The Oak Tree,” Woolf has gotten there first; Orlando’s run through English history is itself intentionally built of stock images. Woolf uses Orlando’s “Oak Tree” for parodic purposes herself: “The Letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the Poet’s Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful reptiles in the first stanzas of ‘The Oak Tree.’ But ‘s’ was nothing, in her opinion, compared with the termination ‘ing.’ The present participle is the Devil himself ” (173). Quercus contains “a paragraph a page and a half long in which all the words began with ‘p’” (123), possibly alluding to the Latin “pequercus” that is the origin of the Slavic god Perun, sharing a common root that means “oak.”



Like Orlando’s oak, the one in Quercus has not reached the end of its life: “Its protagonist was an oak. The novel was a biography of that oak” (122). The novel is about three-thousand-pages long. “At the place where Cincinnatus had stopped the oak was just starting on its third century; a simple calculation suggested that by the end of the book it would reach the age of six hundred at least” (122). But Cincinnatus finds Quercus “distant, deceitful, and dead. . . . [T]he only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself, the inevitability of the author’s physical death” (123, 124). Like Orlando’s three-hundred-year-old-and-counting poem, with its transcendence of the human life span, the oak in Quercus is set in parallel to mortal life, which can only distress Cincinnatus, who is awaiting execution: “What matters to me all this . . . —I, who am preparing to die?” (123). In Invitation, the oak, as part of the natural universe whose greater longevity allows it a longer perspective, plays the role of go-between. The Tamara Gardens provide Cincinnatus a connection to the beyond, the “ennobled, spiritualized” world, by uniting his memory of the beginning of his love for his wife with “its level lawns, the rhododendrons, the oak groves” (27). The Tamara Gardens oaks exist ideally only in his memory; all their other appearances are travesties. When Cincinnatus “mounted the platform, where the block was, that is, a smooth, sloping slab of polished oak, of sufficient size so that one could easily lie on it with outspread arms” (219), oak assists his escape from the prison of the physical world where he will join “beings akin to him” (223); Cincinnatus may be wrong to reject Quercus, which points the way to the otherworld, and Nabokov may be wrong to mock “The Oak Tree,” which resists both ossified literary genres and mortality.38

Pale Fire and Orlando

Nabokov adopts a similar premise in Pale Fire to Woolf ’s in Orlando and uses similar devices as she does a quarter of a century after disparaging Woolf ’s novel to Shakhovskaia: he situates Kinbote in a sweep of historical time that follows the development of Russian and European literature, all of which is made to function as an indirect commentary on his own life.

Pale Fire is an autobiography masquerading as a novel that masquerades as a poem and commentary. Covert references tell the tale of Nabokov’s life from its origins via the history and literature of Scandinavia, Russia and North America from the time of Alfred the Great and the Vikings forward.39 Nabokov’s personal and creative autobiography are alluded to through



distorted references to British literature and history, which focus particularly on the restoration and reign of Charles II of England (an emphasis motivated by Kinbote’s identity as the exiled king of Zembla) and on the eighteenth-century writers Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson (an emphasis motivated by John Shade’s academic interests). If Nabokov instead of Kinbote were composing the index to Pale Fire, these names would figure prominently. As it is, Shakespeare, for example, appears instead in distorted form in the “Zemblan patriot” Shalksbore, Baron Harfar; Kinbote’s index is a parodic mirror of Nabokov’s disguised one, the Terra to his Antiterra. Character and author each have an excessively personal purpose: Kinbote to chronicle his invented Zemblan universe, Nabokov to discern in history the patterns of fate that led him to be exiled from his own realm. Both the fictional and the actual author parody tendentious scholarship, the first parodying the enterprise of the second; both play with the metaphor of restoration—of the kingdom of the past from which Kinbote and Nabokov have been exiled by the Zemblan and Russian revolutions.

Like Nabokov in Pale Fire, Woolf restores through fiction what has been lost in reality: Sackville-West’s ancestral estate of Knole. Sackville-West’s account of it and its artifacts are the source for much of the detail in Orlando. As Victoria Smith writes, “The novel is fundamentally concerned with loss, but loss that is recuperated . . . on a number of levels: personal—Vita loses Violet, Virginia loses Vita, Vita loses Knole; textual—Orlando loses Sasha, Orlando loses the male place of privilege; cultural—both Vita and Virginia suffer losses forced in part by the confines of gender, heterosexuality, and marriage. Each of these losses, however, is at least partially recovered through the writing of Orlando.”40 Nigel Nicolson writes that in Orlando Woolf had “identified Vita with Knole for ever,” demonstrating that “imagination and empathy provide more powerful ways of staking a claim to the past than either patrilineal inheritance laws or conventional models of history.”41 Nabokov’s disinheritance is historical; he wreaks revenge on all revolutions and their hired assassins through his portrait of the bumbling Gradus, while Woolf challenges the inferior status of women in British society by showing gender to be an arbitrary attribute. At the personal level, Nabokov’s novel is rooted in the murder of his father, which was a consequence of the Russian revolution; Woolf ’s novel is related to the inheritance law that deprives Sackville-West of her estate, a result of the institutionalized gender bias that keeps women out of universities and their libraries and therefore out of the canon of English literature, as she chronicles in A Room of One’s Own.

Pale Fire and Orlando are built on the relationship of their fictions to historical reality, which they annotate in playful indexes. Orlando’s index is doubtless inspired by that of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, which refers to



historical figures from Atilla to the Visigoths, French cooks, Owls, and more. All three indexes—Pope’s, Woolf ’s, Nabokov’s—include Pope himself; indeed Pale Fire’s references to the Dunciad camouflage Woolf ’s contribu-tion.42 Woolf ’s index is clearly closer to Nabokov’s than Nabokov’s is to Pope’s, and it is more elaborate; it is even more playful in mixing fictional and historical characters, as well as their writing, without distinction. She lists the kings and queens of England over the 350 years surveyed, along with “Canute, The elk-hound,” and “Pippin, The spaniel,” which were the names of Sackville-West’s dogs. Woolf ’s index refers to great British writers from Shakespeare to Christina Rossetti (historical) as well as to Orlando him/herself (fictional), and major figures mix with obscure ones. Sir Adrian Scrope serves as a double historical reference since there were two of them, on opposite sides of the Cromwellian conflict (compare the paired opposite characters in Pale Fire, such as Odon and Nodo who play a role in the Zemblan revolution). Sir Adrian Scrope (1601–1660) was executed as a regicide (although he had remained neutral), while his distant kinsman, Sir Adrian Scrope of Cockerington (1616–1667), was a royalist officer. (Woolf ’s choice may also have been dictated by the name of the neutral Sir Adrian’s presiding judge: Sir Orlando Bridgeman). In particular, “Charles the Second, King” (Woolf ’s British, Kinbote’s Zemblan) plays a conspicuous role in both novels and their indexes—as a model for Kinbote’s fantasy of restoration and the turning point in Orlando’s transformation from male to female.

The index emphasizes the novel’s deliberate conflation of fiction and reality, so that we return to the novel to discover what may be hidden in names not mentioned there, a device Nabokov uses extensively in Pale Fire. Orlando lists a (fictional) admirer, over six foot two, Harriet Griselda Finster-Aarhorn, whom Woolf presumably names for the Finsteraarhorn mountain, the highest in the Berne Alps. Woolf ’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, one of the early presidents of the Alpine Club, was a renowned climber who made many first ascents and published a mountaineering classic titled The Playground of Europe (1871). Sir Leslie ascended the Finsteraarhorn in 1861 from the Rothhorn in “just six hours” and records in the Alpine Journal that “the view from the summit was very fine, including Mont Blanc, the Monta Rosa chain, the valley of Grindelwald,” and so forth.43 Kinbote indexes Grindelwod, “a fine town in Eastern Zembla” (307); it is separated from Western Zembla by the Bera range, the “highest and hardest” of whose peaks— Mt. Glitterntin—is 7,000 feet high: from it “one can distinguish on clear days, far out to the east … a dim iridescence, which some say is Russia” (note to line 149). Kinbote’s Zemblan Grindelwod, mentioned twice in his commentary, may convey Nabokov’s (rather muffled) appreciation of Woolf ’s method of amusing hidden references, one he uses throughout Pale Fire.



Like Woolf, Kinbote indexes kings, queens, nobles, place names, and writers and their works. Like Kinbote, Woolf parodies the index form by mixing fact (actual British kings and queens) with fiction (Harriet Finster-Aarhorn), high (aristocrats) with low (dogs). The only long entry refers to her hero(ine); she cites one actual work of fiction (Gulliver’s Travels) and one invented one (Orlando’s “The Oak Tree”). The index notes seven places (and there are more) that refer to Orlando’s poem, thereby identifying the oak as an important motif. Kinbote too uses his index to direct the reader’s attention to a topic important to him—the circular puzzle that begins with the entry “taynik” that directs the reader to see “crown jewels,” which in turn points the reader to “hiding place” and then to “potaynik,” which leads the reader back to “taynik”—that refers eventually to Nabokov’s lost kingdom as well as to the similar game he plays in his index to his memoir, Speak, Memory. Again Woolf has rendered the impersonal personal; in Orlando the index, something that customarily performs a utilitarian function in scholarly works, becomes autobiographical, democratizing, and comical as it recasts the genres of history and fiction, scholarship and creative art, from a feminist point of view. Nabokov uses the index to Pale Fire similarly, to comment on the oppositions between public/private, tragic/comic, and madness/sanity through the homosexual Kinbote’s Zemblan-American history.

In A Tale of a Tub, Swift advises that “the most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold: either first, to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail.”44 Nabokov mentioned his acquaintance with Orlando only to Shakhovskaia, but he took Swift’s advice and studied its index, expanding the scope of the Dunciad’s “Index of Persons Celebrated in This Poem” using Woolf ’s methods.

Conclusion

Despite Nabokov’s dislike of women writers in general and Woolf in particular, he seems to have systematically adapted both plot and thematic elements from her work in order to consider the identity and techniques of the artist, the relationship between authorial self and history, and the possibility of a mystical communion among the living and the dead. His choice to disguise his relationship to her important contribution to the



prose fiction of his era perhaps reflects his strenuous effort to transcend his personal anguish in his art. Like Pnin crying in spite of himself at the Soviet propaganda film, Nabokov resisted the sentiment Woolf evoked, including the model of madness and suicide associated with her biography.

The two writers’ common project—transforming personal loss into a redemptive work of art—is encapsulated in another pairing of texts. Woolf transmutes her pain at her mother’s death into Lily Briscoe’s at Mrs. Ramsey’s in To the Lighthouse. In it the same heart-rending cry for the departed loved one (“Jacob! Jacob!”) appears in four places, the final time when Lily, trying to merge “a miracle,” “an ecstasy,” with the everyday in her painting, calls out “Mrs. Ramsey! Mrs. Ramsey!,” feeling that “if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return.”45

In The Gift, Nabokov creates variations on his anguish at the loss of his father; Alexander Chernyshevsky’s insanity after the loss of his son is juxtaposed to Fyodor’s dream resurrection of his father that he accomplishes by working on his biography. The pain is assuaged through the palliative of art. Lily paints the scene where Mrs. Ramsay used to preside: “And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger . . . lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one there” (269).

Nabokov resists the emotional dimension of Luzhin’s agony in The Defense, appearing to reject Mrs. Dalloway’s contention that we can find communion and even redemption by recognizing our shared experiences. Ten years later, in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov borrows the techniques of Jacob’s Room—distancing the narrative voice from its subject, describing settings rather than the absent character, writing fictional biography—but substitutes life beyond the grave for the pathos. Writing Pale Fire two decades after that, Nabokov recognizes Woolf ’s playfulness and rigorous control: the tomfoolery of Orlando creates a web of literary-historical as well as personal connections, which stake a claim for Woolf and Sackville-West in the history of English literature just as Nabokov’s hidden autobiography in Pale Fire earns him a place in the Russian and anglophone traditions. In borrowing from the very book he singled out as trivial, Nabokov obliquely acknowledges that Woolf is a source—and had been all along—for his own writings, before and after his move to English, a source that helped him to transmute individual loss into great literature, to transform the granite of his life into the rainbow of art.

Wesleyan UniversityAgnes Scott College



Notes

1. Vladimir Nabokov to Zinaida Shakhovskaia, 25 Jul. 1933, qtd. in Brian Boyd, The Russian Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 402.

2. “The Admiralty Spire,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 2006), 348.3. Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson, 5 May 1950, in The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 241.4. Maxim D. Shrayer, “Vladimir Nabokov and Women Writers,” The Nabokovian 44

(Spring 2000): 59–60.5. John Burt Foster shows that Nabokov borrows narrative techniques from Ulysses; see

his Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 173–75.

6. See Shrayer, “Vladimir Nabokov and Women Writers”; Yannicke Chupin, Vladimir Nabokov: Fictions d ’écrivains (Paris: Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), esp. chapter 4, “Dames de lettres,” 133–51.

7. In “Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in Despair” (Cycnos 12.2 [1995]: 43–54), Alexander Dolinin shows that in Despair, Nabokov’s parody is aimed as much at Dostoevsky’s epigones as at Dostoevsky’s work itself.

8. Michael Marr, Speak, Nabokov (London: Verso, 2009), 16, 18, 23.9. See Will Norman, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Two Stories by Henry James,”

The Nabokovian 55 (Fall 2005): 7–13.10. Don Barton Johnson, “Vladimir Nabokov and Rupert Brooke,” in Nabokov and His Fiction,

ed. Julian Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 177–96.11. Boyd, The Russian Years, 182.12. See Leona Toker, “Nabokov and Bergson on Duration and Reflexivity,” in Nabokov’s World,

vol. 1, The Shape of Nabokov’s World, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 132–39, Foster, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism, 86, and Rachel Trousdale, Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 81–82.

13. Virginia Woolf, “The New Biography,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 4 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), 4:478; Maria Malikova, V. Nabokov: Auto-bio-grafiia (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002).

14. In “Freudian Fiction” (1920), Woolf writes that “a patient who has never heard a canary sing without falling down in a fit can now walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in his cradle” (Essays of Virginia Woolf, 3:196).

15. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: Vintage, 1992), 60, 61, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

16. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 314, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

17. Gleb Struve, “Les ‘romans-escamotage’ de Vladimir Sirin,” Les mois 4 (April 1931): 145–52.18. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Mark Hussey, annot. Bonnie Kime Scott (Orlando

FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005), 84, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.19. In Virginia Woolf and the Great War (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), Karen

L. Levenback discusses the suppression by the British War Office Committee (which included Dr. Maurice Craig) of the term “shell shock” as an ill-defined excuse for malingering (58).

20. Woolf was herself treated by Dr. Maurice Craig, the same doctor who treated Brooke, whom he found “hypersensitive and introspective,” according to Karen Levenback (“Vir-ginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke: Poised Between Olympus and the ‘Real World,’” The Woolf Miscellany 33 [Fall 1989]: 6).

21. Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladmir Nabokov (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), 254–56, hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. “>( /b34%? @7$+ <#$#)(. A2#-2# *#)2&=($. A2#-2# <4#0"# *#9b($ 3<# *# +036+. B#2#0 2+,+6(, + )#b34,366# C)6# <#$#) 5367: ‘D+$7; E&5+6, #2#*4+23, *#5($&;)2(.’. . .



' /b34% >(@&.($ "&$(". Fb( 0&5)"+. <#$#)( )*#4+$+, + )43/+ 82#<# <4#0( +9b+b($)C ,3*#2 5367. . . . G6 @7)24# *#2C6&$)C " b34.63; 4(03 + &53 =&b)2b#b($, =2# @&.(6%3 + <#$#)( *#/2($"+b(?2 3<#, + #6 63 0#532 63 2#4#*+2%)C. B#/6Cb 4&"&, #6 4b(6&$ 4(0&, + #6( #2*(.6&$()%. H346#3 63@#. G22&/(, +9 82#; .#$#/6#; 2%07, /#63))C <#$#) 5367, 2+.# )"(>($: ‘E&5+6, E&5+6.’. . . >( /b34%?, 035 230, <#$#)( + <4#.#2 4#)$+, @7$# 2(0 =3$#b3" /b(/:(2%, /#$56# @72%,— '($362+6#b, I&4(2+, )2(4+" ) :'32(0+, )#*3b,+;, "4C"(b,+;, + 3-3, + 3-3, + ')3 '03)23 =30-2# @+$+ ' /4#5(-&? /b34%. Ab(/4(26(C 6#=%, #/6("#, @7$( 3-3 )$+,"#0 '7)#"#. . . . B#)$3 06#<+. &)+$+; #6 #"(>($)C ' )24(66#0 + 0&=+23$%6#0 *#$#536++: #/6( 6#<( '+)3$( )6(4&5+, </3 @7$( /4&<(C—63+9b3)26#, ( 23$# 6+"(" 63 .#23$# *4#2+)6&2%)C. J&@(,"( 6( *$3=3 *#4b($()%, ')3 $+:# @7$# 0#"4#3. K:3*+b,+)% 4&"#; >( =2#-2# 'b34.&, #6 @#"#0 *4#$39 ' *4#;0& #"6(. I3*34% #@3 6#<+ '+)3$+ 6(4&5&, + 6(/# @7$# 2#$%"# #2*&)2+2% 2#, >( =2# #6 /345($)C,—+ )*()36, B435/3 =30 #2*&)2+2%, #6 <$C6&$ '6+9. I(0 ,$# "("#3-2# 2#4#*$+b#3 *#/<#2#b$36+3: )#@+4($+)%, '74(b6+b($+)% #24(536+C #"#6, ')C @39/6( 4()*(/($()% 6( @$3/673 + 230673 "b(/4(27, + ' 2#2 0+<, =2# E&5+6 4(95($ 4&"+, ' 2#2 0+<, =2# .$76&$ ' 4#2 )2430+23$%67; $3/C6#; '#9/&., #6 &b+/3$, "("(C +0366# '3=6#)2% &<#/$+b# + 63&0#$+0# 4()"+6&$()% *343/ 6+0” (Vladimir Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina [St. Petersburg: Symposium, 1999], 464–65).

22. “L#b#4+$ + *4#M3))#4, 4())*4(,+b($ E&5+6(: ‘K '(,3<# #2:( @7$( 930$C? N3 *4(b/( $+?’ E&5+6 "+b($. ‘>30$C, /343b6C— 82# *43b#).#/6#,— *4#/#$5($ *4#M3))#4.— K '() @7$+, '346#, $#,(/+, "#4#b7?’ A+b#". ‘F(;23 063 *43/)2(b+2% )3@3 '(- /#0 . . . A4&<#0 '3"#b73 /343b%C. . . . F#0 @#$%,#;, )b32$7;. '(, #23: '#9b4(-(32)C ) #.#27 . . .’ E&5+6 ')*#06+$, "(" #/6(5/7 #23: *4+63) 2#$)2#<#, 63*4+C26#<# *236=+"(, 6(;/366#<# ' "(6('3. ‘F(,’— 63&b34366# #2b32+$ E&5+6. ‘A("+3-6+@&/% *#/4#@6#)2+,’— 0C<"# *#*4#)+$ *4#M3))#4.— ‘B#5($&;)2(. B4#,& '(). D36C +62343)&32, =30 '7 >(6+0($+)% ' /32)2b3, "(" +<4($+. K '() @7$+, 6(b346#3, )#$/(2+"+ ’” (Zashchita Luzhina, 405).

23. “I3*34%, *#=2+ =3439 *C26(/:(2% $32, 82+ <#/7 '#;67 #"(>($+)% 4(9/4(5+23$%6#; *#03.#;, 82# @7$# "("#3-2# *#)C<(23$%)2b# 6( )b#@#/& 2b#4=3)2b(, +@# '# ')C"#; "6+<3, </3 #*+)7b($#)% *#)23*366#3 4(9b+2+3 #*43/3$366#; =3$#b3=3)"#; $+=6#)2+, )$3/#b($# "("-6+@&/% &*#0C6&2% # '#;63, + /(53 )0342% <34#C ' ?67. $32(. 63 0#<$( @72% '7.#/#0 +9 *#$#536+C. 17$+ $+:( + #@)2#C23$%)2b( '#"4&< #@4(>( )76(, "#2#473, " )#5($36+?, @7$+ 07)$+07 2#$%"# 6( M#63 '#;67, 63 0#<$+ @7 )&-3)2b#b(2% @39 82#<# M#6(. ! 43b#$?:+3; @7$# + 2#<# .&53. B# #@-30& 0636+?, #6( *#b$+C$( 6( .#/ 5+96+ ')C"#<# 4&))"#<#; =3439 633 63$%9C @7$# *4#*&)2+2% <34#C, 63 #@5+<(C 3<#, +9@35(2% 33 @7$# 63b#90#56#. O2# &53 @7$# *#/$+66#3 6()+$+3 6(/ '#$3; *+)(23$C. D35 230, "(" 0#<$( 43b#$?:+C >(/32% 3<# )76(?” (Zashchita Luzhina, 349–50).

24. Will Norman, Nabokov, History, and the Texture of Time (London: Routledge, 2012).25. “P$3")(6/4 Qb(6#b+=, P$3")(6/4 Qb(6#b+=!”—>(43b3$# 63)"#$%"# <#$#)#b. N#

6+"("#<# P$3")(6/4( Qb(6#b+=( 63 @7$#” (Zashchita Luzhina, 465).26. “A#</( #6 '79/#4#b3$, 3<#, *#.&/3b,3<# + '74#),3<#, &b39$+ >( <4(6+:&, )*34b(

6( @343< P/4+(2+=3)"#<# 0#4C, </3 #6 $35($ 6( )#$6:3 ' )(/&, 4(97<47b(C ' &03 *(42++, =2# >(*432+2% 30& @7$# 63b#90#56#, >(230—' 6303:"+; "&4#42, </3 #23: '#/+$ 3<# <&$C2% *# 24#*+6"(0, #<#4#536670 >(23;$+b70+ @&"#b70+ *34+$(0+. R3)26(/:(2% $32 )*&)2C, )6#b( *#)32+b 82#2 53 "&4#42, #6 &96($ <$+6C67. @#4#/(27. "(4$ 035/& "$&0@, #@b3/3667. :b32670 <4(b+30, *343/ '74#),3;, *#.#4#,3b,3; <#)2+6+:3;, + 23067;, )74#; $3) 6( .#$0&, 4(96#:b32673 0(9"+ 0()$C6#; "4()"+ ("(5/7; :b32 #96(=($ 6(*4(b$36+3 #*43/3$366#; *4#<&$"+), "#2#470+ @7$ )6(@536 @&"#b7; )2b#$ +$+ )"($( 6( *343"43)2"3, /(@7 63 >(*$&2($ 03/$+23$%67; *&26+"” (Zashchita Luzhina, 344).

27. Vladimir Nabokov, “On A Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel (New York: Vintage, 1991), 316–17.

28. Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 170.

29. Edward L. Bishop, “The Subject in Jacob’s Room,” Modern Fiction Studies 38.1 (1992): 173.30. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923), 43, hereafter cited

parenthetically by page number.



31. Nabokov uses the cliché of the Van Gogh reproduction for Charlotte Haze.32. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 709.33. Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View,” in The Common Reader (New York:

Harcourt, 1989), 173.34. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1989), 103. Elsewhere, he refers

to those oaklings as “my mother’s coevals” (76).35. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), 188, hereafter cited

parenthetically by page number.36. Nabokov to Shakhovskaia, 25 Jul. 1933, in Boyd, The Russian Years, 402. For the complete

letter, see Shrayer, “Vladimir Nabokov and Women Writers,” 56–57.37. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, annot. Maria Dibattista (Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, 2006), 309n.38. Compare the “sky-bound oak” that assists Art Longwood’s transcendence in “The

Ballad of Longwood Glen”; see Vladimir V. Nabokov, Stikhotvoreniia, ed. Maria Malikova (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2002), 408.

39. See Priscilla Meyer, Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

40. See Victoria L. Smith, “‘Ransacking the Language’: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando,” Journal of Modern Literature 29.4 (2006): 63.

41. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 190.42. On Pope and the Dunciad in Pale Fire, see Thomas Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov and the

Art of Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 196–97, 201–3, 211–20.43. “Early Extracts from the Travellers’ Book of the Hotel at the Eggishorn,” ed. Henry F.

Montagnier, Alpine Journal 32 (1861): 222–23.44. Jonathan Swift, The Tale of the Tub (Bibliobazaar, 2007), 87.45. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), 268. Lily Briscoe

imagines Mrs. Ramsay’s presence after her death much as Fyodor portrays Alexander Yakovlevich’s vision of his dead son Yasha sitting in the chair in The Gift: “Mrs. Ramsay—it was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast her shadow on the step. There she sat” (268).


Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf

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