American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Nabokov's Otherworld by Vladimir E. AlexandrovReview by: Stephen Jan ParkerThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 124-125Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308363 .

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124 Slavic and East European Journal

tion to the critical literature on Sokolov. The essays it contains are diverse in scope and theoretical approach; they offer particularized insights and a broad critical overview.

Karen L. Ryan-Hayes, University of Virginia

Vladimir E. Alexandrov. Nabokov's Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. 270 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

There is a new vogue in Nabokov criticism. The substantial body of work already in print has been devoted largely to elucidating the surfaces of his art (complexities of structure, narra- tion, style), debating the presence/absence of a moral/ethical center to his writings, and delineating the metaliterary status of his oeuvre. These now traditional concerns with what may be termed the horizontal plane of Nabokov's art are being supplanted by criticism which takes Nabokov's metaphysics as its subject, i.e., the vertical dimension of his art. Interest in this area, shown early on by Moynahan, Davidov, Johnson, Tammi, and some others has brought us in the past year two major interpretive works: Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Alexandrov's book here under review. Boyd and Alexandrov both acknowledge their debt to the lead provided by Vera Nabokov in her preface to Nabo- kov's Stikhi. "Potustoronnost'," Mrs. Nabokov wrote, was her husband's "main theme ... saturat[ing] everything he wrote." The prodigious studies provided by Boyd and Alexandrov now argue strongly for a reevaluation of the Nabokov critical canon.

Alexandrov's aim, simply put, is "to dismantle" the traditional critical view of Nabokov and "to suggest instead that an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendant realm is the basis of his art." The introductory chapter presents Alexandrov's strategies: redefining Nabokov's language-"reality," "artifice," "nature," "good," "evil"; proposing the centrality of "seminal epiphanic experiences"; viewing Nabokov's oeuvre as a macrotext in which function certain "thematic paradigms"; and demonstrating that Nabokov's metaphysics are linked and insepa- rable from his ethics and aesthetics.

In the first chapter, Alexandrov systematically explores Nabokov's autobiographical and discursive writings to reveal the centrality of Nabokov's personal intuition of the otherworld. His arguments are substantive because his readings are incisive: he elucidates passages others have neglected, or demonstrates how well-known passages have been previously misunder- stood. Taking but one example, the opening line of Speak, Memory reads: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness." Readers might take this at face value, but drawing upon Nabokov's essay "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Alexandrov shows that "com- monsense" was abhorrent to Nabokov ("at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch") thus revealing the opening line as a false proposition. According to Alexandrov, in Nabokov's life the most important experiences with metaphysi- cal implications were epiphanic moments (what Nabokov termed the experience of "cosmic synchronization"), passion for butterflies, passion for chess, love, and the recognition of patterning in life, nature, and art. These experiences provided Nabokov with intimations of a transcendant otherworld which guided his life and generated his art. Alexandrov summarizes Nabokov's Weltanschauung thus: "The transcendent and timeless otherworld is the true real- ity, while the timebound world of phenomena is an alluring illusion." The chapter is a splendid tour-de-force which by itself deserves widest circulation.

If for Nabokov, as Alexandrov puts it, "human life is like a book authored by a transcendent realm," then in Nabokov's books, the author serves to impersonate transcendant fate. The measure of each character's access to the otherworld, and therefore the degree of the char-

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Reviews 125

acter's worthiness, is directly proportional to the degree to which Nabokov provides him with valid experiences of epiphany, love, passion for chess and butterflies, and awareness of patterning. Alexandrov carefully examines the fates of Luzhin, Cincinnatus, Fyodor, V., Humbert, Shade, and Kinbote of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pale Fire, allowing one chapter to each novel. Whereas the Introduction and first chapter are accessible to non-specialists, these close explications de- serve readers well-versed in the texts and prior Nabokov criticism. Each of the readings is cogent and original. The best are of The Gift ("the dependence of art on an otherworldly realm" (115), Lolita ("Humbert's existence [is] colored by experiences that transcend the earthly" (183), and Pale Fire ("patterning in art is a micrcosmic reflection of a macrocosmic order. And although patterning lies in the eye of the beholder, it is nonetheless a valid, if darkling reflection of a transcendent truth, and not a solipsistic projection" (196)). The least satisfactory is the discussion of The Defense in which music (uni-time-dimensional, abstract) is shakily equated with chess (three-dimensional, representational, time-restricted), and the essential distinction between chess problem creation and solution (liked by Nabokov/disliked by Luzhin) and chess playing (never a great interest of Nabokov's/the summa for Luzhin) is ignored. My only cavil with the interpretation of Invitation is the puzzling positive importance Alexandrov gives to Quercus, the "famous," "contemporary novel" and honored product of Cincinnatus' discredited world.

The "Conclusion" chapter is not a conclusion per se, but an essay on "Nabokov and the Silver Age of Russian Culture" in which Alexandrov, with great lucidity, presents parallels and connections between Nabokov and five writers of the Silver Age who also held beliefs in a transcendant "otherworld": Andrej Belyj, Alexsandr Blok, Nikolaj Gumilev, Petr Uspenskij, and Nikolai Evreinov.

"Potustoronnost' " was the buzz-word at the first international conference on Nabokov (Moscow, May 1990) and will undoubtedly be the subject of much Nabokov criticism to come. Alexandrov's book, a major opus in Nabokov studies, will deservedly serve as the benchmark for these future inquiries into Nabokov's metaphysics.

Stephen Jan Parker, University of Kansas

Alexander M. Schenker, ed. American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists: Linguistics. Columbus: Slavica, 1988. 439 pp., $27.95 (cloth).

This book contains twenty three papers, all in Slavic linguistics, philology, and poetics, but otherwise unconnected thematically. Many of the papers are adequately summarized by their titles. These include: D. Frick, "Petro Mohyla's Revised Version of Meletij Smotryc'kyj's Ruthenian Homilary Gospel;" V. Friedman, "The Category of Evidentiality in the Balkans and Caucasus;" H. Galton, "Po'emu otkrylis' praslavjanskie slogi?;" C. Gribble, "On Clitics in Old Bulgarian and Old Russian;" R. Lencek, "On the System of Isoglosses in the Western South Slavic Dialects;" G. Mayer, "Article Use in Generic Be-Sentences in Bulgarian and English;" K. Naylor, "The Relationship of Gender and Declension in the Slavic Substantive;" O. Nedeljkovic, "Jazykovye urovni i xaraxternye 6erty diglossii v srednevekovyx tekstax pravoslavnyx slavjan;" D. Robinson, "The Slavic Versions of the Liturgy of St. Peter;" J. Schallert, "Fixed and Mobile Stress in the Balkan Verb: Synchrony;" C. H. van Schooneveld, "The Semantics of Russian Pronominal Structure;" and B. Volek, "Semantic Properties of Noun Diminutives (Based on Czech and Russian data)."

The remaining titles require brief elaboration. R. Alexander's "The Accentuation of Neu- ter Nouns in Balkan Slavic" is diachronic in approach, attempting to determine if the patterns

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