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Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:20:32 +0400
From: Alex Fak <afak@imedia.ru>
Reply-To: Alex Fak <afak@imedia.ru>
Subject: "The Nabokov Generation" op-ed in the Moscow Times
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provocative from the very epigraph: "Vladimir Nabokov, American writer..."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/04/22/006.html
Friday, April 22, 2005. Page 8.
The Nabokov Generation
By Nina Khrushcheva
Vladimir Nabokov, American writer, born April 23,
1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia
It was a matter of fierce pride for any
Bolshevik: "Russians read more than any other
people on earth." Which in turn was a matter of
bewilderment for any number of Western economists
and management consultants who could not help
noting that hypothetical and literary concepts
have a far greater hold on people than practical
ones. As a result, despite President Vladimir
Putin's consistent assurances that Russia is
doing just fine, capitalism and democracy here
scarcely resemble any Western conception of those
ideas. Russia's bookstores, however, are a
bibliophile's dream.
My Russian heart warms to see that, despite
Internet access, trendy restaurants, pubs and the
multiple jobs people keep just to make ends meet
in these busy post-socialist times, Russians
still read books -- constantly.
My Americanized, rational mind, however, longs to
find a practical way for Russia's reading
passion, and its belief in the writer as prophet
and teacher, to be made to benefit everyone.
Here, after all, Solzhenitsyn and dissident
writers were more important than Brezhnev and
politicians.
Full of messianic intentions, I took a semester
off from my research on the Russian political and
economic transition to venture a few months of
teaching at Moscow State University, or MGU,
where I would give a course on Vladimir Nabokov,
"Nabokov and Us."
Of course, I saw myself in many ways walking in
Nabokov's footsteps. The many long years I've
spent in Princeton and New York have turned a
dreamy Russian intellectual into a practical
Westerner. Please don't take this as a delusion
of grandeur; I am saying only that my experiences
in America have been akin to Nabokov's, not my
writing.
So in returning to Moscow, I felt I had
something to reveal to my fellow Russians: To
become liberal and free, Russia must put its best
traditions of reading to practical use. We should
switch to reading Nabokov rather than trying to
make sense of the IMF briefs -- official
documents have never been a Russian forte -- for
Nabokov has provided a better road map of the way
forward than some uncertain successes in far-away
Indonesia or Brazil. He was able to remain
Russian, dreamily, greedily unambiguously, yet be
a Westerner at the same time.
Like all missionaries, I was humbled to
discover, with satisfaction rather than
disappointment, that I am almost late with my
"good news." Nabokov, who stoically accepted (or
at least claimed such) that he would have very
few readers in his socialist homeland -- indeed,
he imagined his audience in Russia as a "room
filled with people, wearing his own mask" --
would have been extremely delighted at his
reception in his homeland today: The whole
country is wearing his mask.
The contemporary Russian reader reads Nabokov
into everything. In response to a carved bust or
a chocolate statue of Putin, some liberal-minded
Russians quoted Nabokov: "Portraits of the head
of the government should not exceed a postage
stamp in size." Those Russians who stubbornly
disregard material comfort recall his phrase
about the "nuisance of ownership." Those who
insist on individualistic values follow him in
being "an indivisible monist." Nabokov is
translated, retranslated and republished. There
is even a "Nabokov Reader," a guidebook for
schoolteachers on how and why to read Nabokov.
Expecting just a few fanatic students in my
class at the university's School of Journalism, I
walked into the room to find that with each
session the number of people wearing Nabokov's
"masks" doubled. They are deft and determined;
they recite passages of "Lolita" and "Speak,
Memory" by heart in both English and Russian; and
they don't skip classes or make excuses as we did
in my own time at MGU 15 years ago. Instead of
pitifully crying over Akhmatova's "Poem Without a
Hero," or helplessly whispering about
Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" in some
kitchen, these level-headed kids of the
post-post-communist new century put literature to
practical use. They told me they find
19th-century writers too dramatic and too
pathetic, and those of the 20th century too
critical, unhappy, and dissident. Post-communist
literature is too trashy. But Nabokov is just
right!
"Pushkin has been everything for you; Nabokov is
our Pushkin" -- and I detect a tinge of disdain
for the old-fashioned traditions of the past. "He
managed," their faces brighten with admiration,
"to remain 'high' literature and nonetheless be
pragmatic, no-nonsense -- a great stylist with
cool themes and a brave, strong and victorious
individual as hero." "My favorite creatures, my
resplendent characters -- in 'The Gift,' in
'Invitation to a Beheading,' in 'Ada,' in
'Glory,' et cetera -- are victors in the long
run," they passionately quote. "We," they say
with pride in themselves, "are that 'et cetera'.
Nabokov is a literary manual for our everyday
life on the road from unapplied Russian
intellectual to efficient, pragmatic, Western
individual." "Something like 'Pnin,' but better,"
one girl added resolutely.
I was puzzled. "Why do you need me then, why do
you come to this class?" I asked the now 30
students in the room.
They said they needed somebody who had already
gone the way Nabokov and his characters had -- to
make sure it's doable, to verbalize the
experience through his books.
Despite rising concerns as to what Putin's
"power vertical" may mean for the future, we can
be certain that Russia's liberal transition has
not been in vain after all.
Nina Khrushcheva teaches international affairs at
New School University in New York. Her book
"Visiting Nabokov" is forthcoming from Yale
University Press. She contributed this comment to
The Moscow Times.
© Copyright 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
--
Alex Fak
Business Reporter
The Moscow Times
+7 095 937 3399 (work)
+7 910 486 0926 (cell)
www.themoscowtimes.com
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