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  As Dostoyevsky was writing The Brothers Karamazov, a story of a family in the provinces, he was grappling with the political and cultural dilemmas that would beset him all his life. During the years he was writing this book, he was (along with Tolstoy) the greatest of Russia’s novelists, and by the end of his life the public had at last accepted this as fact. Just before he wrote this novel, he was publishing a magazine, The Diary of a Writer, in which he collected his ideas, bêtes noires, and literary sketches on politics, culture, philosophy, politics, and religion. With his wife’s help he published his last books and this magazine by himself, and because the magazine was at this point the country’s most popular literary intellectual journal, he was even earning a decent living from it. In his youth he’d been a left-wing Westernizing liberal, but in the last years of his life, Dostoyevsky defended Pan-Slavism, going so far as to praise the czar, who by freeing the serfs in 1861 had made a youthful dream of Dostoyevsky’s come true (and who also had pardoned Dostoyevsky himself, in 1849, just before he was to have been executed for a political offense); Dostoyevsky was proud of the small personal connection he had established with the czar’s family. Upon hearing that the 1877—78 Russian-Ottoman war, launched under the influence of Pan-Slavism, had begun, he went to the cathedral to pray tearfully for the Russian people. (It has been the custom in Turkey to remove or change, in various translations of The Brothers Karamazov, the words he utters against the Turks in the fever of war.) By the age of seventy, Dostoyevsky, now receiving many letters from readers and admirers, respected even by his enemies, had become a tired old man; a year after publishing The Brothers Karamazov, he died. Years later, his wife would recall how her husband would continue to climb four flights of stairs to a regular literary meeting, although the effort would leave him exhausted and panting for breath, all for the sake of the immoderate pride he felt when the meeting fell silent at his arrival. Despite bouts of jaundice owing to liver ailments, Dostoyevsky refused to give up the joy of writing till dawn while smoking and drinking tea.

  Dostoyevsky’s career is a succession of literary miracles; that he wrote one of the greatest novels ever at a time of failing health was his final coup de grâce. There is no other novel that goes back and forth between a person’s daily life—his family quarrels, his money problems—and his grand ideas, no other novel that seizes the mind as this one does. Along with orchestral music, the novel is Western civilization’s greatest art, and so it is a notable irony that Dostoyevsky, who wrote one of the greatest novels ever, hated the West, and Europe, as much as today’s provincial Islamists.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Cruelty, Beauty, and Time: On Nabokov’s Ada and Lolita

  There are, as I’ve said, writers who—though they teach us many things about life, writing, and literature, and though we read them with love and ardor—remain in our past. If we return to them in later years, it is not because they still speak to us but out of nostalgia, the pleasure of being taken back to the time when we first read them. Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, and even Faulkner belong to this camp. Today, when I take them up, I do not expect to be overwhelmed with new insights, all I wish is to remember how they once influenced me, how they shaped my soul. They are writers I may from time to time crave, but not writers I still need.

  On the other hand, every time I pick up Proust, it is because I wish to remind myself how boundlessly attentive he is to his heroes’ passions. When I read Dostoyevsky, it is because I need to be reminded that, whatever other anxieties and designs he might have, the novelist’s main concern is depth. It is almost as if the greatness of such writers stems in part from our profound longing for them. Nabokov is another writer whom I read over and over, and I doubt I will ever be able to give him up.

  When I am going on a trip, preparing my suitcase for a summer holiday, or setting off for a hotel to write the last pages of my latest novel, when I pack my dog-eared copies of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory (which in my view shows Nabokov’s prose at its finest), why do I feel as if I am packing a box of my medicines?

  It is the beauty of Nabokovian prose. But what I call beauty cannot explain this. For lurking beneath the beauty in Nabokov’s books there is always something sinister (he used this word in one of his titles), a whiff of tyranny. If the “timelessness” of beauty is an illusion, this is itself a reflection of Nabokov’s life and times. So how have I been affected by this beauty, underwritten as it is by a Faustian pact with cruelty and evil?

  When we read his famous scenes—Lolita playing tennis; Charlotte’s slow descent into Hourglass Lake; Humbert, after he has lost Lolita, standing on the roadside at the top of a little hill, listening to children playing in a small town (a snowless Breughel) and then meeting with someone he loved as a youth in the woods; the afterword for Lolita (which he says took him a month to write, though it is only ten lines); Humbert’s visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam; or the crowded family scenes in Ada—my first response is that life is just like this; the writer is telling us things I already know, but with a shocking and resolute honesty that brings tears to my eyes at just the right moment. Nabokov—a proud and confident writer with an exact knowledge of his gifts—once noted that he was good at putting “the right word in the right place.” His flair for le mot juste, Flaubert’s term for this brilliant selectivity, gives his prose a dizzying, almost supernatural quality. But there is cruelty lurking behind the pristine words that his genius and imagination have given him.

  To better understand what I call Nabokov’s cruelty, let us look at the passage in which Humbert pays a visit to the barber in the city of Kasbeam—just to kill some time, shortly before Lolita so cruelly (and rightfully) leaves him. This is an old provincial barber with the gift of gab, and as he shaves Humbert he prattles on about his baseball-player son. He wipes his glasses on the apron over Humbert and puts down his scissors to read clippings about the son. Nabokov brings this barber to life in a few miraculous sentences. To us in Turkey he is as familiar as if he lived here. But at the last moment, Nabokov plays his last and most shocking card. Humbert takes so little interest in the barber that not until the last minute does he realize that the son in the newspaper cuttings died thirty years earlier.

  In two sentences—sentences that took two months to perfect—Nabokov evokes a provincial barbershop and the garrulous barber’s boasts about his son with an élan and an attention to detail worthy of Chekhov (a writer whom Nabokov explicitly admired); then, having drawn the willing reader into the melodrama of the “dead son,” he immediately drops it and we return to Humbert’s world. We understand from this cruel and satirical rupture that our narrator has not the least interest in the barber’s woes. What’s more, he is assured that, because we too are caught up in Humbert’s amorous panic, we will dwell on the barber’s son, who has been dead for thirty years, no more than he does. And so we share the guilt for the cruelty that is beauty’s price. In my twenties I always read Nabokov with a strange sense of guilt and with a Nabokovian pride at developing a shield against that guilt. This was the price I paid for the beauty of the novels and also for the pleasure I took from them.

  To understand Nabokov’s cruelty and its beauty, we must first remember how cruelly life treated Nabokov. Born into an aristocratic Russian family, he was dispossessed of his estates and all his wealth after the Bolshevik revolution. (Later he would proudly claim indifference.) Leaving Russia for Istanbul (where he stayed one day in a Sirkeci hotel) he went first to live in exile in Berlin; from there he went to Paris, emigrating to America after the Germans invaded France. Though he perfected a literary Russian in Berlin, once in America he lost his mother tongue. His father, a liberal politician, was destroyed by a botched murder like the one described with such satirical heartlessness in Pale Fire. Coming to America in his forties, he lost not just his mother tongue but his father, his patrimony, and his family, whose members were spread across the world. If we do not wish to judge him too harshly for his curious brand of malice—w
hat Edmund Wilson called “kicking the underdog”—or the pride with which he eschewed all interest in politics, or the way he ridiculed and even degraded ordinary people for their coarse manners and kitsch tastes, we must bear in mind the losses that Nabokov suffered in real life, particularly in relation to the great compassion he showed his heroes and heroines, like Lolita, Sebastian Knight, and John Shade.

  As is clear from his description of the Kasbeam barber, Nabokov’s cruelty emerges in finely detailed expositions which show that nothing in life—in nature, in other people, in our surroundings, our streets, our cities—answers to our pains, to our troubles. This awareness reminds us of Lolita’s remark about death (“you are completely on your own”), which her stepfather also admired. The deep joy in reading Nabokov comes from our seeing the cruel truth: Our lives do not fit at all into the logic of the world. Having come to terms with this truth, we can begin to appreciate beauty for its own sake. Only when we have discovered the deep logic governing the world—the world we can appreciate only through great literature—can we be consoled by the beauty in our hands; in the end, our only defense against life’s cruelties is Nabokov’s fine symmetries, his self-referential jokes and mirror games, his celebration of light (to which this always exceedingly self-aware writer referred to as a “prismatic Babel”), and his prose, as beautiful as the fluttering wings of a butterfly: After losing Lolita, Humbert tells the reader that all he has left is words and, in a half-mocking way, talks airily of “love as the last refuge.”

  The price of admittance to this refuge is cruelty, which gives rise to such feelings of guilt as I’ve described. Because Nabokov’s prose owes its beauty to cruelty, it is crippled with the same guilt, and so too is Humbert as he searches for timeless beauty with all the innocence of a small child. We sense that the author—the narrator, the speaker of this wondrous prose—is forever trying to conquer this guilt, which quest only fuels his fearless cynicism, his brilliant diatribes, and his frequent returns to the past, to his memories of childhood.

  As we can see in his memoirs, Nabokov looked back on his childhood as a golden age. Though writing with the example of Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth in mind, Nabokov shows no interest in the sort of guilt that Tolstoy derived from Rousseau. It is clear that for him guilt is a pain that came after childhood, after the Bolsheviks forced him from his Russian idyll, a pain he was suffering at the time he was honing his style. “If all Russian writers write about their lost childhoods,” Pushkin once said, “who will speak of Russia itself?” Though Nabokov is a modern instance of the tradition of which Pushkin was complaining—the literature of the landowning aristocrat—there is a great deal more to him than that.

  Nabokov’s quarrels with Freud, and the pleasure he took in needling him, suggest that he was trying to defend himself against the terrible guilt he felt about the golden age of his childhood. To put it differently, he was trying to protect himself from prohibitions and pronouncements of guilt and not from Freud’s idiocies (as Nabokov himself described them). For when he began to write about time, memory, and eternity—and his pages on these themes are among his most brilliant—Nabokov was also attempting sorcery of a Freudian sort.

  Nabokov’s concept of time offers an escape from the cruelty that attends beauty and engenders guilt. As he elaborates the concept at length in Ada, Nabokov reminds us that our memories allow us to carry our childhood with us, and with it the golden age we thought we had left behind. Nabokov brings this simple, self-evident idea into being with a fine lyricism, showing how the past and the present can coexist in a single sentence. The encounters with belongings evoke the past at the most unexpected moments; the images are laden with wondrous memories, opening our eyes to the golden age that is always with us, even in the ugly material world of the present. Memory—according to Nabokov, the writer’s and the imagination’s greatest resource—envelops the present with the halo of the past. But this is not a Proustian narrator who, nearing the end of his life, with no future, returns to the past. Nabokov’s insistent explorations of memory and time speak of a writer who is certain of the present and the future, and who knows that his memories are born of games and shaped by the vicissitudes of experience. Lolita’s balanced vitality derives from the sometimes serene and sometimes agitated flitting back and forth between the past and the present: Humbert’s narration darts from memories of his childhood (long before Lolita) to memories after her flight of the happy times he spent with her. When Nabokov speaks of these wondrous memories, he uses the word paradise repeatedly; in one passage he even refers to the icebergs of paradise.

  Ada is, by contrast, Nabokov’s attempt to carry the lost paradise of the past into the present. Because Nabokov knew that a world made up of memories from a lost golden age could survive neither in the America in which he then lived (Lolita’s America, a land wavering between freedom and coarseness) nor in Russia (by then part of the Soviet Union), he blended his memories of these two worlds to create a third country, a wholly imagined literary paradise. Compounded of a surfeit of details from a childhood he viewed as sinless, it is a strange and wondrous world of unbridled narcissism that is thoroughly childish. We have here not an elderly writer gathering childhood memories; in an elegant, arrogant tour de force, Nabokov sets out to transplant his childhood into his old age. We see his lovelorn heroes not just realizing their childhood loves but preserving the states of being that will allow them to carry those loves with them until death. Humbert might spend his life searching for the lost love of his childhood, but Van and Ada want to live forever in the paradise that radiates from their childhood love. First we learn that they are cousins, later that they are brother and sister. Like Freud, whom he so loved to hate, Nabokov makes this disclosure guardedly, suggesting that taboos are what banish us from the paradise of childhood.

  The Nabokovian childhood is a paradise far from guilt and sin; we can feel true admiration for the egoism in Ada and Van’s love. This in turn will cause us to identify with poor Lucette, whose great love for Van is unrequited. As Van and Ada enjoy the enchanted heaven that the narrator has created for them, Lucette (the book’s most modern, troubled, and unhappy character) becomes the victim of Nabokovian cruelty, excluded from the major scenes in the book and from the great love that many readers feel for it.

  This is the point at which the author’s greatness depends on the reader’s. As Nabokov struggles to bring his paradise into our own times—to create for himself a refuge from reality—his will to indulge his private jokes and puns, his secret pleasures and games, and to elaborate his awe at the boundlessness of the imagination—this impulse produces moments in Ada when he loses the impatient reader. This is the point at which Proust, Kafka, and Joyce also refuse their readers, but unlike these other writers, Nabokov, father of the postmodern joke, has foreseen the reader’s response and so embroils him in a game: He speaks of the difficulty of Van’s philosophical novel, of how “in the drawing-room prattle among fan-wafting ladies” he is viewed as conceited for his indifference to literary fame.

  In my youth, when everyone around me expected novelists to engage in social and moral analysis, I used this proud Nabokovian stance as my shield. Seen from Turkey, the characters in Ada and in Nabokov’s other novels from the 1970s looked like fantasies of a nonexistent world “cut off from the present.” Fearing I might be smothered by the cruel and ugly demands of the social milieu in which I planned to set my novels, I felt a moral imperative to embrace not just Lolita but also the books like Ada, in which Nabokov took to the outer limit his puns, sexual fantasies, erudition, literary games, self-referential jokes, and taste for satire. This is why for me great literature lives in a nearby place, cooled by the alienating wind of guilt. Ada is a great writer’s attempt to eradicate that guilt, to use the power and will of literature to bring paradise into the present. This is why, once you lose your faith, in this book and in the incestuous union of Van and Ada, the book is drowned in a sin that is the opposite of what Nabokov intend
ed.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Albert Camus

  As time goes on, therefore, we cannot remember reading writers without also revisiting the world as we knew it when we first read them and recalling the inchoate longings they awoke in us. When we are attached to a writer, it is not just because he ushered us into a world that continues to haunt us, but because he has in some measure made us who we are. Camus, like Dostoyevsky, like Borges, is for me this kind of elemental writer. Such a writer’s prose ushers one into a landscape waiting to be filled with meaning, suggesting, nonetheless, that any literature with metaphysical designs has—like life—limitless possibilities. These authors, read when you’re young and reasonably hopeful, will inspire you to want to write books as well.

  I read Camus sometime before reading Dostoyevsky and Borges, at the age of eighteen, under the influence of my father, a construction engineer. In the 1950s, when Gallimard was publishing one Camus book after another, my father would arrange for them to be sent to Istanbul, if he was not in Paris to buy them himself. Having read the books with great care, he enjoyed discussing them. Though he tried, from time to time, to describe “the philosophy of the absurd” in words I could understand, it was not until much later that I came to understand why it spoke to him: This philosophy came to us not from the great cities of the West, or the interiors of their dramatic architectural monuments and houses, but from a marginalized part-modern, part-Muslim, part-Mediterranean world like ours. The landscape in which Camus sets The Stranger, The Plague, and many of his short stories is the landscape of his own childhood, and his loving, minute descriptions of sunny streets and gardens belong neither to the East nor to the West. There was also Camus the literary legend: My father was as enthralled by his early fame as he was shaken when the news came that he had died, still young and handsome, in a traffic accident the newspapers were only too eager to call “absurd.”