# Two Cheers for Anti-Statism **URL:** **By** Frederic Reynolds **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- “For the critic, there is nowhere to hide.” _Vladimir Nabokov: America’s Russian Novelist_, by G. M. Hyde. Marion Boyars, 230 pp., $6.95. In the Shifting, symbiotic relationships that link the creative literary artist, the literary critic, and the reader, it is the critic who occupies the most precarious position. The critic’s position is precarious because it is doubly parasitic: dependent on the artist for a subject, and equally dependent on the reader for an object. If it is the artist’s task to create an imaginary world that by some conjurer’s trick bears a relation to the real world of the reader’s experience, and if it is expedient—or vital—for the artist to invent new tools, new symbols, a new “language” to effect this miracle of illusion made truth, then it is the critic’s task to “interpret” this language, to make pellucid what is opaque, and to make accessible what is difficult. Should there be a failure, a breakdown in this delicate communicative chain, the artist can retreat behind the veil of “artistic integrity,” while the reader can toss the book in the trash. For the critic, there is nowhere to hide. As if this were not enough, there are authors whose reputations for craft and cleverness are so daunting as to humble the cautious critic, and incite the reckless one. Such an author is the late Vladimir Nabokov. It is to the credit of critic G.M. Hyde, then, that his study _Vladimir Nabokov:_ _America’s Russian Novelist_ is neither self-effacing nor flamboyant. Hyde’s book, recently published in paperback by Marion Boyars, was completed shortly before Nabokov’s death in 1977, and it offers to the reader analyses of all 18 of Nabokov’s novels. (Hyde deliberately narrows the scope of his study to exclude Nabokov’s non-fiction, drama, and shorter works.) Who was Vladimir Nabokov? He is, of course, widely recognized as the author of _Lolita_. What may be less well known is that Nabokov was one of the many twentieth century intellectuals whose lives were warped by ‘the idiotic and despicable regimes’ that have blighted our era. According to the brief chronology provided in Hyde’s book, Nabokov’s life was warped by politics not just once, but repeatedly. Nabokov was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg. His father was a distinguished classical-liberal politician who on one occasion was incarcerated for his anti-Tsarist opinions. In 1919 the Nabokov family fled from the Bolshevists to Turkey on a Greek fruit boat. The family reestablished itself in Berlin’s exile community, where Nabokov’s father edited the leading liberal emigré newspaper. In 1922 the father was assassinated for his political opinions, by a Russian rightist who later became one of Hitler’s assistants. The young Nabokov was again forced to flee with his family, to France and then to America, to escape from the Nazis (leaving behind his renowned collection of butterflies — Nabokov enjoyed a separate international reputation as a lepidopterist, and another as a composer of chess problems). Not all of the Nabokovs escaped. In 1945 Sergei, Vladimir’s eldest brother, died in a Nazi prison camp. Given this all too intimate acquaintance with the State, what does Nabokov the artist have to say to us? A reading of Hyde’s study reveals three related themes in Nabokov’s work: the personal, the political, and the aesthetic. The personal themes reflect the concerns of a sensitive and gentle man who has lost a great deal in the course of his life. Nabokov’s work is suffused with a quiet nostalgia, and with a respect for culture, language, morality, and other time-binding human endeavors that cannot be ripped away by the nearest thug in a brown shirt. On the other hand, Nabokov’s politics reflected no such gentility. His contempt for the State was matched only by his fascination with the growth and transformation of the individual. For a man whose life was hounded by ‘imbecilic jack-boots,’ this fascination reveals an awesome faith in humanity. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Nabokov offers to us an important view of the utility of art. As Hyde puts it, ‘His strenuous defense of his liberty of conscience … must have influenced his conception of his art as a looking-glass land of truth and freedom.’ (Hyde’s interpretation of Nabokov’s aesthetics is impressively accurate, and can stand comparison to Nabokov’s own _Lectures on Literature_, Fredson Bowers editor, recently published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.) Nabokov’s unique artistic method arises from this view of art, and it is his method that has daunted many previous critics. For Nabokov was one of the finest stylists of the English language. He wrote an English of gem quality: colorful, corruscating, and cold. His stiletto-like passages under-score the flabby, flatulent prose on which so much ‘serious literature’ hangs. Nabokov had an unerring eye for absurdity in both life and narrative, and he unfailingly subjected it to assault from his most devastating weapon: a corrosive, withering humor. As Hyde notes, ‘\[P\]astiche and parody are in his work essentially comic versions of _ostrannenie_.’ _Ostranenie_, an important concept in Russian literature, is (again quoting Hyde) ‘the de-familiarization of the world, the suspension of the conceptual framework that shapes experience.’ With his immense cleverness, Nabokov lay traps for the careless reader as well as the over-eager exigist. These puns, puzzles, and blind alleys are, says Hyde, more than a mere mannerism, because to Nabokov, ‘art is nature’s handmaid, serving to reveal truth by means of a complex assault on habit.’ This kind of assault is characteristic of Nabokov’s artistic method. It is intended as a slap to the reader, that he may blink his eyes and see this looking-glass land afresh. Hyde’s critical skills (and weaknesses) are especially well displayed in his chapter on ‘History as Nightmare,’ in which he discusses Nabokov’s two explicitly political novels, _Invitation to a Beheading_ (1935, 1960), and _Bend Sinister_ (1947). It is in these two novels that Nabokov’s art, politics, and humanity are most successfully blended. _Invitation to a Beheading_ relates the imprisonment of Cincinnatus C., who is jailed and sentenced to death by some ludicrous regime for the crime of ‘gnostic turpitude,’ a crime so hideous that it must be named only in whispers or referred to euphemistically as ‘opaqueness’ in a world where everyone is literally ‘transparent.’ _Invitation_ is, as Hyde correctly notes, ‘one of Nabokov’s most mannerist and ornamental’ novels, inviting comparison to Kafka for ‘its combination of political and metaphysical allegory.’ Allegory it surely is, for the reality which envelops Cincinnatus becomes increasingly bizarre. He spends his time trying to find out the date of his execution, while the major figures in his life parade by like circus clowns. He desires freedom, but only achieves it when he stops placing his hope for salvation in others, when he turns inward, searching for ‘the elusive truth … hidden at the heart of his experience.’ Cincinnatus is truly one of Colin Wilson’s ‘Outsiders.’ He finds his truth, his identity, on the chopping block, and _Invitation_ ends optimistically, as Cincinnatus sheds his chrysalis for a better reality ‘where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.’ _Bend Sinister_ is one of the great contemporary anti-statist novels. It is the story of Adam Krug, philosopher, and his courageous battle against a totalitarian, Central European state. There has been a revolution, and Paduk, a particularly mediocre schoolmate of Krug’s, is the new dictator. Paduk rules as chairman of the ‘Ekwilist’ party (say it aloud), and Nabokov savagely lam-poons the development and tenets of the whole berserk philosophy of ‘Ekwilism.’ As Hyde puts it, Krug is ‘subjected to very literal harassment and shut away in a very material prison for a crime much less rarified than Cincinnatus’s — non-cooperation with a boring and brutal dictatorship.’ Krug wins his battle for integrity and independence, but like his creator, he pays a great cost; his career, his friends, his child, and ultimately his sanity are lost, lost to the grossest kind of stupidity and error. As Nabokov himself has said, _Bend Sinister_ reminds us of ‘the torture an intense tenderness is subjected to.’ Taken with _Invitation_, these two novels are both a plea for and a defense of the total liberty of the human spirit. Hyde’s understanding of this seems only partial. Thoroughly grounded in Russian literature, Hyde is useful in pointing out the obscure allusion, or the multilingual pun. His insights into Nabokov’s views on art are accurate and, for the most part, clearly presented. He seems weakest in handling Nabokov’s uncompromising politics, and has a tendency at times to overlook meaning that is overt, or even read it right out of the text. His chapter on History as Nightmare concludes where I believe it should have commenced, with the statement that the two novels’ ‘vindication of individual freedom is inevitably political.’ Overall, of course, Hyde’s book is quite useful. In his preface to his son’s English translation of _Invitation to a Beheading_, Nabokov wrote of his work, ‘It is a violin in the void. The worlding will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures. No clubwoman will thrill…. But… I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair.’ It is the accomplishment of G.M. Hyde that now many more readers may know this agitated state, much to their profit and delight. Frederic Reynolds is a South Florida banker and student of literature.