Chasing Nabokov
After an aborted attempt at a listless novel, I picked up something that was sure to make my spine tingle: Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. On this reading, however, I got stuck in the foreword he wrote for its English translation in 1959. I decided to spend the night chasing some threads which, for unknowable reasons, intrigued me.
(Caveat lector: I am not a scholar and my Russian is best described as taciturn. But I do have the internet and, in this case, I would rather be armed with Google than Gogol.)
After its serialization in Sovremennïya Zapiski, a Russian émigré magazine, Invitation to a Beheading drew comparisons to Kafka’s work. Nabokov seems to have been annoyed enough by this to protest the connection:
…reviewers, who were puzzled but liked it, thought they distinguished in it a “Kafkaesque” strain, not knowing that I had no German, was completely ignorant of modern German literature, and had not yet read any French or English translations of Kafka’s works. No doubt, there do exist certain stylistic links between this book and, say, my earlier stories (or my later Bend Sinister); but there are none between it and Le chateau or The Trial.
I was prepared to take him at his word. But he continues:
Incidentally, I could never understand why every book of mine invariably sends reviewers scurrying in search of more or less celebrated names for the purpose of passionate comparison. During the last three decades they have hurled at me (to list but a few of these harmless missiles) Gogol, Tolstoevski, Joyce, Voltaire, Sade, Stendhal, Balzac, Byron, Bierbohm, Proust, Kleist, Makar Mariniski, Mary McCarthy, Meredith (!), Cervantes, Charlie Chaplin, Baroness Murasaki, Pushkin, Ruskin, and even Sebastian Knight. One author, however, has never been mentioned in this connection—the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book; namely, the melancholy, extravagant, wise, witty, magical, and altogether delightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented.
Now I was suspicious. The list contains some names to which he was probably compared and some to which he almost certainly was not. There are also flights of fantasy beyond Delalande: Sebastian Knight, the protagonist of his first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Tolstoevski, an amalgam of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski; and the enigmatic Makar Mariniski, who has managed to evade my Googling.
Perhaps this is just Nabokov having fun at the expense of his more credulous readers, but something else on the next page caught my eye:
My favorite author (1768–1849) once said of a novel now utterly forgotten “Il a tout pour tous. Il fait rire l’enfant et frissonner la femme. Il donne à l’homme du monde un vertige salutaire et fait rêver ceux qui ne rêvent jamais.”
For a man who wrote that one must “fondle the details,” he is being transparently vague here about his favorite author—a rather philistine notion, anyway—and a forgotten novel. My BS senses tingling, I searched for viable candidates matching those dates.
The first was Maria Edgeworth. A brief survey of Wikipedia disqualified her. The other was Dolley Madison. Again, this didn’t seem right. These people sound too boring for Nabokov to even feign interest in them. I tried another approach: instead of starting with the dates, I looked for authors whom Nabokov had admired. The more obscure the better, for if Nabokov were to admit a favorite author, it would be one worthy of his erudition.
At last, I found someone: François-René de Chateaubriand. He lived from 1768–1848, so the dates don’t quite match up, but it’s just a year off his death. Close enough. I purchased the complete works, fully expecting to emerge as victor from this particular rabbit hole.
Alas, it was not to be. The quote was nowhere to be found.
I now think that Nabokov made it up. In fact, it was probably written by Pierre Delalande, author of Discours sur les ombres, whom he invented. Delalande also wrote the novel’s epigraph: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels.” (As a madman believes himself to be God, we believe ourselves to be mortal.)
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As I write this in the wee hours I’m reminded of another mystifier, Werner Herzog, who is infamous for inventing things in his documentaries—and for including facts in his fictions, though that’s not as often remarked upon. The epigraph to his film Lessons of Darkness reads:
Blaise Pascal
Herzog openly admits to fabricating this quote, but it may as well have been written by Pascal. An interviewer once asked Herzog why he chose to “lie.” Why not use the quote but not cite anyone, implying your authorship?
She, I believe, was missing the point. ∎