Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000606, Fri, 26 May 1995 13:39:20 -0700

Subject
RJ:A Russian Beauty (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE: NABOKV-L continues its weekly series of analyses of VN's
short stories drawn from a book manuscript by British Nabokovian Roy
Johnson. Please address your comments to either NABOKV-L or directly to
Roy Johnson.
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This week's story - A RUSSIAN BEAUTY
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'A Russian Beauty' (July 1934) which Nabokov himself describes
as "an amusing miniature" (RB,p.2) is not very much more than the
use of the short story form as the frame for a character sketch -
and it is an outline or a thumbnail sketch at that. Olga is an
attractive young Russian woman over whom men go wild. After the
revolution she moves with her family to Berlin and becomes a
fashionable young thing, but following the death of her father
she begins to decline both socially and physically. She also
feels that she is too old at thirty to ever marry. When some
friends introduce her to a wealthy businessman she accepts his
proposal, but dies the following year in childbirth.

In a superficial sense that is all there is to the story. The
character is rendered largely in terms of her physical appearance
and her gestures - something which Nabokov is particularly
skillful at depicting:

"she languidly danced the foxtrot to the sound of the
gramophone, shifting the elongated calf of her leg not
without grace and holding away from her the cigarette
she had just finished smoking, and when her eyes
located the ashtray that revolved with the music she
would shove the butt into it, without missing a step"
(p.5)

But underneath the surface of the sketch we are offered a
parallel which is being drawn, as in so many of his other stories
of the twenties and thirties, between Russia and a woman. For
Olga represents the *old* Tsarist Russia which many thought might
survive the emigration to make a come-back, but which by the
early thirties was obviously dead. Olga "was born in the year
1900, in wealthy, carefree family of nobles ... Her childhood
passed festively, securely, gaily, as was the custom in our
country" (p.3). This upbringing also incidentally parallels
Nabokov's own, and of course he often puts himself forward as a
representative of the *ancien regime*.

Olga has a portrait of the Tsar pinned to her door - that is, she
keeps alive the old traditions and beliefs, and it is only when
her father dies (he too is a representative of Tsarist Russia)
that she begins to go into decline. And even though she appears
to have located her saviour, a husband, it is too late: she
cannot survive beyond the early 1930s.

The parallel is not heavily underscored. She is given the hint
of an illness at the outset to make the early death plausible -
but there are so many other instances of women and Russia being
offered alongside each other in some way (one thinks of *Mary*,
his first novel) that the reading seems justified.

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Next week's story - TORPID SMOKE
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--
Roy Johnson | Roy@mantex.demon.co.uk
PO Box 100 | Tel +44 0161 432 5811
Manchester 20 | Fax +44 0161 443 2766