*
Read at the Festival of the Arts, Cornell University, April 10, 1958.
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
good, and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep — it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. Nabokov, we feel [in such cases we don't think, we feel] that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it. This is a publisher's opinion, and everybody has the right to have an opinion. Nobody would exile me to the wilds of Alaska for having my happy atheist published after all by some shady experimental firm; and on the other hand, authors in America are never ordered by the government to produce magnificent novels about the joys of free enterprise and of morning prayers. In Russia before the Soviet rule there did exist restrictions, but no orders were given to artists. They were—those nineteenth-century writers, composers, and painters—
quite certain that they lived in a country of oppression and slavery, but they had something that one can appreciate only now, namely, the immense advantage over their grandsons in modern Russia of not being compelled to say that there was no oppression and no slavery.
Of the two forces that simultaneously struggled for the possession of the artist's soul, of the two critics who judged his work, the first was the government. Throughout the last century the government remained aware that anything outstanding and original in the way of creative thought was a jarring note and a stride toward Revolution. The government's vigilance in its purest form was perfectly expressed by Tsar Nicholas I in the thirties and forties. His chilly personality pervaded the scene much more thoroughly than did the philistinism of the next sovereigns, and his attachment to literature would have been touching had it really come from the heart. With striking perseverance he tried to be everything in relation to Russian writers of his time—a father, a godfather, a nurse, a wetnurse, a prison warden, and a literary critic all rolled up in one. Whatever qualities he may have shown in his own kingly profession, it must be admitted that in his dealing with the Russian Muse he was at the worst a vicious bully, at the best a clown. The system of censorship that he evolved lasted till the 1860s, was eased by the great reforms of the sixties, stiffened again in the last decades of the century, broke down for a short spell in the first decade of this century, and then had a most sensational and formidable comeback after the Revolution under the Soviets.
In the first half of the last century, meddlesome officials, heads of police who thought that Byron was an Italian revolutionary, smug old censors, certain journalists in the government's pay, the quiet but touchy and wary church, this combination of monarchism, bigotry, and cringing administration hampered the author to a considerable degree but also afforded him the keen pleasure of pin-pricking and deriding the government in a thousand subtle, delightfully subversive ways with which governmental stupidity was quite unable to cope. A fool may be a dangerous customer, but the fact of his having such a vulnerable top-end turns danger into a first-rate sport; and whatever defects the old administration in Russia had, it must be conceded that it possessed one outstanding virtue—a lack of brains. In a certain sense, the censor's task was made more difficult by his having to disentangle abstruse political allusions instead of simply cracking down upon obvious obscenity. True, under Tsar Nicholas I a Russian poet had to be careful, and Pushkin's imitations of naughty French models, of Parny, of Voltaire, were easily crushed by censorship. But prose was virtuous. Russian literature had no Renaissance tradition of vigorous outspokenness as other literatures had, and up to this day the Russian novel remains on the whole the most chaste of all novels. And, of course, Russian literature of the Soviet period is purity itself. One cannot imagine a Russian writing, for example, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
So the first force fighting the artist was the government. The second force tackling the nineteenth-century Russian author was the anti-governmental, social-minded utilitarian criticism, the political, civic, radical thinkers of the day. It must be stressed that these men in general culture, honesty, aspirations, mental activity, and human virtue were immeasurably superior to the rogues in the government's pay or to the muddled old reactionaries that clustered around the shivering throne. The radical critic was concerned exclusively with the welfare of the people and regarded everything—literature, science, philosophy —as only a means to improve the social and economic situation of the underdog and to alter the political structure of his country. He was incorruptible, heroic, indifferent to the privations of exile, but also indifferent to the niceties of art. These men who fought despotism—the fiery Belinski of the forties, the stubborn Chernyshevski and Dobrolyubov of the fifties and sixties, Mihaylovski, the well-meaning bore, and dozens of other honest obstinate men—all may be grouped under one heading: political radicalism affiliated to the old French social thinkers and to German materialists, foreshadowing the revolutionary socialism and stolid communism of recent years, and not to be confused with Russian Liberalism in its true sense, which was absolutely the same as cultured democracy elsewhere in Western Europe and America. In looking through old periodicals of the sixties and seventies, one is astounded to find what violent 13
Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
ideas these men were able to express in a country ruled by an absolute monarch. But with all their virtues, these radical critics were as great a nuisance in regard to art as was the government. Government and revolution, the Tsar and the Radicals, were both philistines in art. The radical critics fought despotism, but they evolved a despotism of their own. The claims, the promptings, the theories that they tried to enforce were in themselves just as irrelevant to art as was the conventionalism of the administration. What they demanded of an author was a social message and no nonsense, and from their point of view a book was good only insofar as it was of practical use to the welfare of the people. There was a disastrous flaw in their fervor. Sincerely and boldly they advocated freedom and equality but they contradicted their own creed by wishing to subjugate the arts to current politics. If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics writers were to be the servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime, the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state.
One of the best examples of the clash between the artist and his critics in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century is the case of Pushkin, Russia's first great writer. Officialdom headed by Tsar Nicholas himself was madly irritated by this man who instead of being a good servant of the state in the rank and file of the administration and extolling conventional virtues in his vocational writings (if write he must), composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident in the novelty of his versification, in the audacity of his sensual fancy, and in his propensity for making fun of major and minor tyrants. The church deplored his levity. Police officers, high officials, critics in the pay of the government dubbed him a shallow versificator; and because he emphatically refused to use his pen for copying humdrum acts in a governmental office, Pushkin, one of the best educated Europeans of his day, was called an ignoramus by Count Thingamabob and a dunce by General Donner-wetter. The methods which the state employed in its attempts to throttle Pushkin's genius were banishment, fierce censorship, constant pestering, fatherly admonishment, and finally a favorable attitude toward the local scoundrels who eventually drove Pushkin to fight his fatal duel with a wretched adventurer from royalist France.