Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000416, Tue, 3 Jan 1995 15:52:15 -0800

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RJ:The Aurelian (fwd)
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EDITOR'S NOTE: The following essay on Nabokov's story "The Aurelian" is
part of a weekly series on NABOKV-L. These materials are drawn from a
book manuscript on Nabokov's short stories by Roy Johnson
<Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk>. The stories are treated in chronological order.
Those wishing to read the stories in advance of their discussion will
find next week's story listed at the end of the message. It is hoped that
these postings will encourage discussion on NABOKV-L. Your comments may be
sent directly to Roy Johnson or to the list. DBJ

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This week's story - THE AURELIAN
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In 'The Aurelian' (1931) Nabokov returns to his theme of the
unexpected arrival of death, and he indulges himself slightly by
giving the principal character his own interest in lepidoptery
(for which 'aurelia' is a now old-fashioned term). Pilgram is a
pathetic old German who has inherited a not very successful shop
from his father. He sells butterflies, but most of his meagre
earnings come from the odd bits of stationery he sells to
schoolboys. He has developed a reputation for his entomology
without ever having travelled beyond Berlin, but for years he has
nurtured a secret desire to go on a collecting expedition so as
to actually see some of his prey in their natural and to him
exotic surroundings. When an old lady asks him to sell a
collection on her behalf he cheats her and decides to make his
wish come true as quickly as possible, even though his daughter
is getting married the same day. He leaves his wife a curt note
saying he has gone to Spain, but when she returns from the
wedding later that day she finds him in the shop, dead from a
heart attack.

Pilgram is one of a number of Nabokov's characters who meet death
unexpectedly - either at a point of happiness (Mark Standfuss in
'Details of a Sunset') or as a grotesque surprise (Quilty in
LOLITA). The problem with Pilgram's case as far as the reader is
concerned is the somewhat ambiguous manner in which he is
portrayed. His scientific idealism and his desire to travel are
rather utopian, but we are nevertheless invited to sympathise
with the dreams in which "he...visited the islands of the
Blessed, where in the hot ravines that cut the lower slopes of
the chestnut- and laurel-clad mountains there occurs a weird
local race of the cabbage white" (ND, p.103). But he is a rather
unpleasant character, and is offensively rude to his wife, to the
point that when she annoys him by crying he "toy[s] with the idea
of taking an axe and splitting her pale-haired head" (p.106). He
cheats the old lady, and he prepares to leave knowing the family
will have debts and unpaid taxes.

Germans are not generally portrayed very sympathetically in
Nabokov's work, but Pilgram is particularly unappealing. It seems
that it is not his death we are being invited to contemplate so
much as its ironic timing - just as "the dream of his life was
about to break at last from its old crinkly cocoon" (p.106).

The neat structural division of the story into four distinct
sections certainly reinforces this impression. The first
describes the pathetically humdrum nature of Pilgram's daily
life; the second his enthusiasm for lepidoptery and his yearning
to travel; the third his double-dealing and his preparations for
the trip; and the fourth his wife's return from the wedding. This
last switch in viewpoint allows the revelation to be concealed
until the last lines of the story - although it has been hinted
at in signals beforehand, as when he feels the first to us
premonitory tremor of his heart "like a mountain falling upon him
from behind just as he had bent towards his shoestrings" (p.96).

'The Aurelian' illustrates a point made over and again by Nabokov
in his critical writings - that it is not the overt subject
matter which constitutes the beauty in a work of art so much as
the manner in which the details of its composition are arranged.
Paul Pilgram is a nasty old man with unrealistic dreams, but
Nabokov does not arrange the story to engineer sympathy for his
death so much as to invite our admiration for the manner in which
it is told. One small and typically Nabokovian detail will
demonstrate this point.

When an irritating visitor to the shop has been looking at some
butterfly specimens

"It might happen ... that some open box, having been
brushed by the elbow of the visitor, would stealthily
begin to slide off the counter - to be stopped just in
the nick of time by Pilgram, who would then calmly go
on lighting his pipe; only much later, when busy
elsewhere, he would suddenly produce a moan of
retrospective anguish" (p.102)

The threatened accident which doesn't quite occur: this is a
device Nabokov uses regularly in his work (one thinks of Pnin's
dropping nutcrackers onto a glass bowl - which *doesn't* break).
The reader breathes a sigh of relief with Pilgram. But later when
he returns to the counter to grab petty cash for his escape
"Pilgram perceived something almost appalling in the richness of
the huge happiness which was leaning towards him like a mountain"
(p.109). This of course is his final stroke, approaching in the
repeated simile of the mountain, and then

"catching sight of the hazy money pot ... [he] reached
quickly for it. The pot slipped from his moist grasp
and broke onto the floor with a dizzy spinning of
twinkling coins; and Pilgram bent low to pick them up"
(p.109)

Something does fall from the counter after all, and Pilgram bends
down just as he did at his first stroke. But this time he does
not get up, and that is how his wife finds him: "his back to the
counter, among scattered coins, his livid face knocked out of
shape by death" (p.111).

These are the sorts of carefully orchestrated details which
Nabokov so frequently commended in the work of other writers:
"This capacity to wonder at trifles ... these asides of the
spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest
form of consciousness" (LL,p.374) and probably the reason why he
called his own critical approach "a kind of detective
investigation of the mystery of literary structures" (LL,p.1).

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Next week's story - A BAD DAY
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