Resultados de la evaluación de lineamientos

The similarities between Vadim’s dysfunctional family and the Veens in Nabokov’s Ada fittingly call to mind Nabokov’s inversion in that novel of the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike” (3). Vadim’s broken home—“I saw my parents infrequently,” he writes. “They

divorced and remarried and redivorced at… a rapid rate” (Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 8)—and “atrocious, intolerable” childhood (7) invert the devoted, loving family and happy childhood of Nabokov’s own life. Young Vladimir “Volodya” Nabokov saw his parents— who remained utterly devoted to each other in what was the first and only marriage for each—virtually every day of his young life. The portrait of his father that Vadim provides similarly derives from a blend of the fictional Veen family and a grotesque parody of Nabokov’s own father, Vladimir Dmitrievich (V.D.) Nabokov.

My father was a gambler and a rake. His society nickname was Demon [the name of Ada and Van’s father in Ada]. Vrubel has portrayed him with his vampire-pale cheeks, his diamond eyes, his black hair. What remained on the palette has been used by me, Vadim, son of Vadim, for touching up the father of the passionate siblings in the best of my English romaunts, Ardis (1970).

The scion of a princely family devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars, my father resided on the idyllic outskirts of history. His politics were of the casual, reactionary sort. He had a dazzling and complicated sensual life, but his culture was patchy and commonplace. He was born in 1865, married in 1896, and died in a pistol duel with a young Frenchman on October 22, 1898, after a card-table fracas at Deauville, some resort in gray Normandy.(96)

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There are certain similarities between Vadim’s and Nabokov’s “princely” families, both of which might rightly be characterized as “devoted to a gallery of a dozen Tsars.” But the portrait of Vadim “Demon” N., Vadim Vadimovich’s father, is drawn from an almost total reversal of the life, character, and career V.D. Nabokov, who was a considerably cultured Anglophile, a rather sedate and temperate man of moderate habits, and a monogamist passionately devoted to his wife and the mother of his children, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov (née Rukavishnikova). He was also a man who did not quite “reside on the idyllic outskirts of history.” Far from being of “the casual reactionary sort,” V.D. Nabokov’s politics were of the truly passionate, modern liberal democratic sort. A leading member of the Constitutional Democratic party (the Kadets), V.D. Nabokov played a fairly prominent role in the Russian politics of his day, being elected to the First Duma and serving as secretary to the Provisional Government established in the wake of the February Revolution. (The possibility, alluded to earlier, of Vadim’s having been actually fathered Count Nikifor Nikodimovich Starov, as well as the possibility that his marriages may be incestuous, also echo similar elements in Nabokov’s Ada as well as parodying suggestions of infidelity and illegitimate children in Nabokov’s own family.)

Like Nabokov, Vadim is sent into exile in the wake of the Bolshevist Revolution. The high adventure of his escape resembles King Charles the Beloved’s (a.k.a. Charles

Kinbote’s) alleged flight from Zembla in Nabokov’s Pale Fire far more, however, than it does Nabokov’s own retreat in stages—first to the Caucuses and then to England—with his family. Vadim writes, “One autumn evening poor Mstislav’s [“a Polish landowner, a distant relation of mine”] young mistress showed me a fairy-tale path winding through a great forest where a last aurochs had been speared by a first Charnetski under John III (Sobieski)”

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(Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 9); and before he crosses the border, to make good his escape, he is forced to shoot and kill a Red Army soldier (10). Both Vadim—a self-described “unpopular orphan” (4)—and Nabokov arrive in England, graduating from Cambridge in the spring of 1922 (by which time Nabokov had himself been technically “orphaned” by the murder of his father). Both, while students there, have distant encounters with the poet A.E. Housman, “whose glum features and drooping-thatch mustache [Nabokov] saw at Trinity’s high table almost every night” (Boyd, The Russian Years 171). Vadim declares, “I had seen him many times from afar and once, plain. It was in the Trinity Library. He stood holding an open book but looking at the ceiling as if trying to remember something—perhaps, the way another Author had translated that line”(Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 22).

Vadim’s émigré years in Europe are spent largely residing in Paris, which was, according to Vadim “becoming the center of émigré culture and destitution” (Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 51). Nabokov did live for a brief time—approximately eighteen months, until May 1940, when he emigrated to the United States—in Paris, a city he disliked

immensely. “”Wherever they moved,” Boyd writes, “Nabokov found Paris oppressive, and in later years he would recall it as the gray, gloomy city on the Seine. Sitting in the Deux

Magots with George Hessen and his French translator, he ran the city down: ‘Parizh,’ he would say, in the Russian manner: ‘Pas riche’” (The Russian Years 504).

Like Vadim and Iris, Vladimir and Véra Nabokov lived for a time in a shabby two- room flat in the 16th arrondissement. The Nabokov’s address at 59 rue Boileau (their last Paris address) becomes Vadim’s address at rue Despréaux,, 23—Boileau being the former half and Despréaux, being the latter half of the name of the seventeenth/eighteenth century French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. During these years of European exile,

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Vadim writes and publishes under the penname V. Irisin—a name deriving equally from Nabokov’s own nom de plume, V. Sirin as from the name of Vadim’s first wife, Iris; though at some point, like Nabokov, he desists from the practice and “revert[s] to [his] own family name” (Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 97)—conspicuously not provided. Brian Boyd notes that “when his invented double, Vadim Vadimych… describes the working methods of his émigré years, he partly matches his maker” (The Russian Years 345). Vadim describes them as follows:

A first draft, made in pencil, filled several blue cahiers of the kind used in schools, and upon reaching the saturation point of revision presented a chaos of smudges and scriggles. To this corresponded the disorder of the text which followed a regular sequence only for a few pages, being then interrupted by some chunky passage that belonged to a later, or earlier, part of the story. After sorting out and repaginating all this, I applied myself to the next stage: the fair copy. It was tidily written with a fountain pen in a fat and sturdy exercise book or ledger. Then an orgy of new

corrections would blot out by degrees all the pleasure of specious perfection. A third phase started where legibility stopped. Poking with slow and rigid fingers at the keys of my trusty old mashinka (“machine”), Count Starov’s wedding present, I would be able to type some three hundred words in one hour instead of the round thousand with which some popular novelist of the previous century could cram it in longhand. (Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! 80-81)

To an excerpt from this same passage, Boyd appends, “Finally Nabokov, unable to type, would dictate the whole book to his wife as she typed it out” (The Russian Years 345).