Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000546, Sun, 2 Apr 1995 10:30:17 -0700

Subject
RJ:Perfection (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE: NABOKV-L is pleased to present its weekly installment
from Roy Johnson's book manuscript on VN's short stories. Your comments
are invited.

From: Roy Johnson <Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk>

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This week's story - PERFECTION
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'Perfection' (1932) re-uses the material of the 1924 story
'Details of a Sunset' - the sudden arrival of death into an
otherwise happy existence. In this instance it is that of Ivanov,
a poor geography graduate who is forced to give private lessons
to survive. Once again we have the down-at-heel but this time
sympathetically portrayed petty bourgeois struggling to maintain
appearances: "Some sort of flannel entrails were trying to escape
from his necktie, and he was forced to trim off parts of them"
(TD, p.188). His pupil is a young boy, David, for whom he feels
a tender affection: at one point he even imagines him as the son
he once lost when a lover suffered a miscarriage and died. Ivanov
maintains an inner dignity, and the reader is invited to admire
his poetic sensibility and delicacy of feeling. Despite the
embarrassment of having socks "so full of holes that they
resembled lace mittens" (p.198) he persists in taking delight in
his perceptions of the world around him. When a young boy makes
fun of him by imitating his odd gait in the street, Ivanov thinks
that something is being pointed out to him overhead and looks up
to see

"three lovely cloudlets, holding each other by the
hand ... the third one fell slowly behind, and its
outline, and the outline of the friendly hand still
stretched out to it, slowly lost their graceful
significance" (p.189)

He is in fact a dreamer, but he posits this attitude as an
imaginative insurance against the possibility of worse things to
come and against the decay of Time: "Ivanov foresaw he would
often appear in David's dreams, thirty or forty years hence"
(p.187). We are back amongst those elements of which Nabokov
composed so many of his stories - elements which are philosophic
universals and of course all closely related to each other:
individual consciousness, memory, the passage of time, and death.


Ivanov is asked by his employers to take David to the seaside and
there suffers further humiliations at the exposure of his poor
clothes and his city-dweller's lack of ease on the seashore. He
also has a weak heart, and when David shouts for help whilst
swimming Ivanov is forced to overcome his loathing of the cold
sea to save the boy.

At this point Nabokov brings off a very skilful twist in the
narrative, which up until then has been consistently from
Ivanov's point of view. First of all Ivanov realises that he has
failed to save David and he begins to feel sympathy for the
bereaved mother. But then he senses that something is wrong about
such thoughts and understands that "if David was not with him,
David was not dead" (p.201). The narrative then takes us back to
the shoreline where David is looking out to sea, regretting the
trick he has played of pretending to be in trouble - and we
realise that it is Ivanov who has drowned as the narrative goes
back on an expansive note to describe the beauties of everyday
life which he had so much appreciated:

"and the Baltic Sea sparkled from end to end, and, in
the thinned out forest, across a green country road,
there lay, still breathing, freshly cut aspens; and a
youth, smeared with soot, gradually turned white as he
washed under the kitchen tap, and black parakeets flew
above the eternal snows of the New Zealand mountains;
and a fisherman, squinting in the sun, was solemnly
predicting that not until the ninth day would the
waves surrender the corpse" (p.201).

Ivanov's impending death is signalled all through the story by
references to his weak heart, but the resolution to the story is
deft nevertheless. As in the case of Mark Standfuss in 'Details
of a Sunset' we are taken, by adhering to his point of view,
close to the boundary between life and death; but then by
exploiting the flexibility of the third person mode we are taken
by sleight of hand back into the logical framework of the
narrative.

The only weakness in the story is that there is no distinction
made between the poetic dreamings attributed to Ivanov and those
offered by Nabokov himself as narrator. In this respect therefore
he stands between himself and his creation throughout, and a
reader could object that he fails to provide convincing evidence
of Ivanov's independent ability to produce the images he does.

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Next week's story - THE ADMIRALTY SPIRE
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