The time before death

The Time before Death

159 Internationale Forschungen zur

Allgemeinen und

Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit

Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner

(Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) –

Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy

(Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister

(Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Norbert Bachleitner

(Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien

Constantin V. Ponomareff

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

The Time before Death

Twentieth-Century Memoirs

Cover Image: Barbara Ponomareff

Cover design: Inge Baeten

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Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden

Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions

Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin

herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im

Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi.

From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication

by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin.

The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other

publications by Editions Rodopi.

ISBN: 978-90-420-3612-3

E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0883-3

© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 7

2. The Metaphor of Loss in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory 9

3. André Gide’s If It Die. The Creative Gamble 17

4. Günter Grass’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel.

The Final Battle with the Black Witch 25

5. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words. On the Impact of Childhood 31

6. Boris Pasternak’s Safe Conduct and I Remember. A Charmed Life 43

7. Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening.

A Tormented Spirit 55

8. Arthur Koestler’s The Invisible Writing.

Autobiography as Escape from the Self 71

9. Maxim Gorky’s Childhood. Beyond Good and Evil 83

10. Octavio Paz’s The Itinerary. An Intellectual Journey.

In Search of Identity 91

11. Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern. A Bipolar Journey 105

12. Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being. The Silence Within 115

13. Katherine Mansfield’s Notebooks. The Chameleon Self 125

14. Christa Wolf’s One Day A Year, 1960-2000.

The Fear of Self-Revelation 137

15. Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance. The Return to Life 147

16. Lidiya Chukovskaya’s To the Memory of Childhood.

In Her Father’s Shadow 157

17. One Last Farmstead of Feeling 163

1. Introduction

The twentieth century was a tragic century, a century in which the view of

man as a benign and enlightened being seemed lost forever amid the

atrocities of two World Wars and numerous holocausts. Perhaps

Christianity’s obsession with evil and the salvation of a sinful humanity was

far closer to the image of man.

And yet, human beings have survived all the evil spawned by the

twentieth century. In this context, Twentieth-Century Memoirs gives us an

intimate sense of the human cost of this survival, but also of the survival of

the good in human beings. Goethe had put it well in the first part of his

Faust:

Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange

Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt.

(A worthy soul through the dark urge within it

Is well aware of the appointed course.) (Walter Arndt, tr.)

Hence, though many of these autobiographical writings are both witness to

and an indictment of human brutality, they are also an assertion of human

worth. For that alone they deserve their place in the history of twentieth￾century life.

Autobiographies always revolve around a profound personal need, be it

the expression of some inner psychological problem, or a traumatic or social

experience whose emotional impact energizes the whole. The

autobiographical reminiscences in this collection of essays were written by

major twentieth-century writers who were each in their own way aware of

the historical and tragic realities of their century. Given the catastrophic

nature of twentieth-century life, it comes as no surprise that the

overpowering historical and social traumas should have shaped most of

these memoirs, some in more pathological ways than others.

In writing these essays, I have tried to let the memoirs speak for

themselves, even though they are, of course, not exempt from the traditional

pitfalls of autobiography. At times the memoirs played havoc with memory,

truth and morality. Some writers were selective as perhaps they must be,

when the trauma of loss and grief pushed everything else aside. By the same

token, the trauma of loss could, on occasion, inspire an author to relive and

to transmit as much as memory could bear of a now bygone past. In some

cases what was left out was intentional, self-serving and dishonest and, in

some extreme instances, a writer would for personal reasons even deny his

8 The Time before Death

past. At times the truth only came out after a lifetime of self-concealment, of

spiritual and moral anguish – and what could be more sincere than anguish

in whatever form? – or the truth might be forced into silence by the

oppressive political climate surrounding a writer. At still other times, the

memory was so traumatic that the self sought relief in flight, in hiding from

life or in suicide.

Autobiography offered these writers the means for asserting the reality

of their own existence and of the significance of their creative work in a

world gone berserk. And the weapons they used to establish themselves and

leave their mark were ideological, socio-political, moral and aesthetic. Of

these the ideological response was sometimes the most suspect when it

tailored the memoir to suit a political cause. Other social and political

critiques of twentieth-century society had real cultural substance to them.

Moral and social indictment were perhaps the most potent means for

stirring up the conscience of a humanity found wanting. There were also

poetic or aesthetic responses – some more suspect than others – as well as

the pathological fallout from the spiritual and moral devastation of the

century.

It is not surprising, given the inhuman temper of the century, to find in

all these writers at a deeper emotional level a partial or total rejection of the

contemporary world. Not everyone denied their social environment

outright. Some, though they rejected the inhuman aspects of European

society, believed or hoped that a moral change was still possible. Others,

who repudiated a totalitarian society, still believed that their world, imperfect

as it was, could still be changed for the better. After all is said and done,

these memoirs leave us with tragic personal histories which, each in their

own way, give us a more intimate sense of the fevered beat of a century in

upheaval.

2. The Metaphor of Loss in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory1

In the field of Russian letters Sergey Aksakov, Alexander Herzen and Leo

Tolstoy have left us with memorable memoirs of 19th-century Russian life.

In the 20th century, Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin and Konstantin Paustovsky

wrote of childhood and beyond. The most memorable of Russian memoirs,

however, perhaps because it is also the closest and the most relevant to our

time, is Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.

Speak, Memory was the product of some twenty years of work, from 1946

to 1966. Nabokov (1899-1977) wrote it first in English as Conclusive Evidence

which appeared in 1951. He rewrote it into Russian as Drugie berega (Other

Shores), publishing it in 1954. His revised, final and definitive version came

out in English in 1966 as Speak, Memory.

Nabokov’s memoir, rich in personal memorabilia very close to his heart,

is one of the finest things he ever wrote, comparable to the best of his

fiction, especially The Defense, Pnin and Pale Fire. As an autobiography, Speak,

Memory is the tragic account, by now only too well known, of the Russian

white émigré experience of having to leave Russia after the Revolution of

1917, sometimes forever, and having to eke out a living in Berlin, Paris or

elsewhere. But it can also stand for all the displaced people and refugees of

the 20th and early 21st centuries who share Nabokov’s profound sense of

exile, each in their way.

Nabokov was, in the end, more fortunate than some of his émigré

compatriots. After he and his family left Russia in 1919, he was able to

complete his university education in Cambridge, become one of the best￾known young Russian émigré writers in Europe, and fortunate enough to

escape the gathering Nazi holocaust and war, and leave for the United States

in 1940, where he established himself as an American writer in his own right

and was soon to become financially independent.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is full of poignant reminiscences of family

history, family life, of governesses and tutors, English, French and Russian,

coming and going, bringing with them upper class European culture. And

though movingly described in everyday terms that were to haunt Nabokov

through a lifetime, the reality of a way of life that his memoir was able to

evoke was furthermore enhanced metaphorically by a more profound and

pervasive feeling of loss, all the more acute when faced with the intensity of

1 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. (New York: Wideview

Perigee Books, 1966).

10 The Time before Death

remembrance, a remembrance all the more painful because “the kind of

Russian family to which I belonged – [is] a kind now extinct – …”

It was the loss, the absence, the haunting imagery of a lost world, the

sense of emptiness and nothingness – not the loving details of a life

remembered – that came to define the traumatic reality in Nabokov’s

autobiography. He pointed to the metaphorical quality of his reminiscences

himself: “ Thus, in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum – the beauty

of intangible property, unreal estate – and this proved a splendid training for

the endurance of later losses.”

This traumatic feeling of loss was coupled with a sense of the

precariousness of human existence. The very first line of Nabokov’s first

chapter, which brings to mind yet another line in one of Turgenev’s letters

to Pauline Viardot, said as much: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and

common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light

between two eternities of darkness.”

Though Nabokov expressed his love for this now extinct world of his

childhood in the realistic details of a bygone time, it was what Nabokov

made of their deeper psychological and philosophical significance to himself

that shaped the much more real and elegiac undercurrent of Speak, Memory.

Once again, he did leave us a hint of his metaphorical vision when he

remarked: “To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood

recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when

they tackle the fragments of a saga.”

Thus the spiritual autobiographical account in Speak, Memory, lies in its

imagery and metaphor, in what lies beyond the concrete and visible data of

Nabokov’s life. The story of General Kuropatkin’s matches is a case in

point. Nabokov himself encouraged a metaphorical reading of his life when,

in the context of Kuropatkin’s story, he observed: “the following of such

thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of

autobiography.”

In his second chapter, which gives us a loving portrait of his remarkable

mother, he reiterated the same idea in his belief that our visible world can

never quite sum up what we intuit as a metaphysical dimension beyond our

ken:

It is certainly not then – not in dreams – but when one is wide awake, at

moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of

consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits from the

mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen

through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the

right direction.

The Metaphor of Loss in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory 11

At one point in his memoir, Nabokov spoke of his “hypertrophied sense of

lost childhood,” and his “almost pathological keenness of the retrospective

faculty” . With these remarks in mind, it is not surprising that Nabokov

should have had recourse to metaphor in order to convey the intensity of his

loss in a receding past, a loss more real than the present, a loss that over

time became a “robust reality,” a reality that in effect made “a ghost of the

present.”

In this context, his choice of sketching a portrait of Mademoiselle, his

Swiss governess, come to teach him French, is revealing. To begin with, why

did he choose a figure who was not very likable in the fist place, one difficult

to get along with, far from attractive as a person, and undertake, as he put it,

“a desperate attempt to save what is left of poor Mademoiselle.” He did it

because, metaphorically speaking, what attracted him to her were not the

details of her uneventful life, but her personification of the tragedy of exile

with which Nabokov could identify: “ ‘Giddy-eh? Giddy-eh?’ [her Russian

for “where”, C.V.P.] she would wail, not only to find out her whereabouts

but also to express supreme misery: the fact that she was a stranger,

shipwrecked, penniless, ailing, in search of the blessed land where at last she

would be understood.” At the very end of his chapter on Mademoiselle, he

slipped in the following lines which suggest that she was perhaps after all

much greater than the sum of all her parts: “Just before the rhythm I hear

falters and fades, I catch myself wondering whether, during the years I knew

her, I had not kept utterly missing something in her that was far more she

than her chins or her ways or even her French.”

In another chapter of Speak, Memory, Nabokov described his lifelong

passion for butterfly collecting. But the chapter was also a paean to art.

Butterflies became a metaphor for his writing. Their metamorphoses from

caterpillar to butterfly, from the commonplace to the beautiful, their

“mysteries of mimicry,” became an analogue for the artist’s creative process.

And though Nabokov confessed at one point that “the man in me revolts

against the fictionist,” it was the artist who won out in the end: for, the

processes in nature and art had much too much in common to be

abandoned for existence alone. In his words: “I discovered in nature the

nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were forms of magic, both

were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

In the concluding passage to this chapter, Nabokov drew yet another

implicit parallel between the love, passion and ecstasy involved in butterfly

collecting and the artist’s protean creative experience:

And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random –

is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy and

behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a

12 The Time before Death

momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with

sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal

genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

The enormous artistic significance of the caterpillar-butterfly phenomenon

to Nabokov’s creative process reminds one of Walt Whitman’s romantic

definition of poetic inspiration in his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of

Grass: “The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes

into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and

life of the universe.”2 For Nabokov the poetic transformation of the real

world through metaphor was “the main theme” of his writing. His view of

the poetic process came very close to Whitman’s: “There is, it would seem,

[Nabokov wrote] in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate

meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by

diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically

artistic.”

Reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory one realizes that for him there was a

fateful connection between the game of chess and life’s events, be they past,

present or future.This chess connection became increasingly more tangible

as Nabokov began to recount his family’s escape from revolutionary St.

Petersburg to the Crimea in the south and then across the Black Sea to

Constantinople and Greece, and his father’s assassination at a public lecture

in Berlin in 1922 by a tsarist agent.

Father and son had always been associated with chess. They would solve

chess problems together. Ten years before his father’s death, chess was

already casting an ominous shadow on the future: “But no shadow was cast

by that future event upon the bright stairs of our St. Petersburg house: the

large cool hand resting on my head [his father’s, C.V.P.] did not quaver and

several lines of play in a difficult chess composition were not blended yet on

the board.”

Nabokov likened his father’s “simple and elegant” disguise as a doctor in

the Crimea to what “a chess annotator would have said of a corresponding

move on the board.” The chess symbolism became even more suggestive of

ultimate loss as the Greek freighter carrying the Nabokovs zigzagged its way

out of the Sebastopol harbour under heavy machine gun fire towards the

open sea: “I remember trying to concentrate, as we zigzagged out of the bay,

on a game of chess with my father – one of the knights had lost its head,

and a poker chip replaced a missing rook.”

2 Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, edited with an introduction and

glossary by James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), p. 415.

The Metaphor of Loss in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory 13

But there was also a metaphorical crossover from chess into Nabokov’s

own writing, whose “real life [as he put it, speaking of Sirin, his European

pseudonym, C.V.P.] … flowed in his figures of speech.” In another instance,

Nabokov inserted a photograph of himself working on his novel The Defense,

the tragic story of Luzhin, a chess genius. And if one is familiar with

Nabokov’s novels, it becomes fairly obvious that there was a kinship

between his chess and his writing, as we can gather from the following

remarks he made on his composing chess problems in exile: “Deceit to the

point of diabolism, and originality, verging upon the grotesque, were my

notions of strategy; ….. I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the

exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a

sponge-bag containing a small furious devil.”

In the end, the crossover from chess to fiction was very much like his

metaphorical crossover from chess to life. One other telling example of the

latter was the following. In a particularly difficult chess problem it took him

months to solve, it was “one obscure little move by an inconspicuous pawn”

that was the key to victory. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that this

inconspicuous pawn stood for Nabokov himself who, just the day before he

solved this chess problem had, finally, after months of bureaucratic

wrangling, been successful in getting an exit visa for himself and his family

to leave for the United States.

From the way in which Nabokov presented these developments on the

chessboard and in real life, side by side, it seems fairly obvious that his intent

was to suggest that, for him at least, there existed a connection between

chess and life: “All of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess

problem a whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close.

Everything around was very quiet; faintly dimpled, as it were, by the quality

of my relief. Sleeping in the next room were you and our child.”

The last chapter of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, revolved around the birth

of their son in Germany in the spring of 1934, and bathed these final pages

in a lyrical and joyous light. Nabokov’s fatherhood triggered a return to his

own childhood, even though the political climate of the 1930s and Hitler’s

rise to power was far from conducive to such bliss and joy. Perhaps the

child’s birth afforded Nabokov a much needed escape from the ignominies

of the Nazi state.

All this explains his obsession with their son, “our child,” repeated again

and again , as if it were an incantation to ward off an evil time. The “roots of

memory … are enabled to traverse long distances…” , Nabokov wrote, and

connected their now four-year old playing on a beach in the south of France

to his own childhood and beyond:

14 The Time before Death

I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by

our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued,

the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the

two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882,

and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a

hundred years ago – and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been

preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely

complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and

now mended by these rivets of bronze.

The imagery here spoke eloquently of Nabokov’s nostalgia for wholeness in

a now fragmented world. And the feeling of love – “a special Space maybe,”

– that their child brought back into Nabokov’s life, became a paean to the

miracle of life, of rebirth and of continuity.

But love for their child was only a part of a much greater whole. For, to

Nabokov, love was of the very essence of the universe. It was a vast, all￾encompassing love, yet, at the same time, a love centered in Nabokov’s very

being: “I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my

mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to

fight the utter degradation, ridicule and horror of having developed an

infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.” One of

Nabokov’s finest passages gave voice to this “infinity of sensation” called

love:

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of

immediately drawing radii from my love – from my heart, from the tender

nucleus of a personal matter – to monstrously remote points of the universe.

Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such

unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very

remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the

unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening

involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

Love in the present gave Nabokov back a sense of vibrant reality that

countered that “ghost of the present” that had for such a long time

undermined his sense of reality. Love as metaphor was like an “infinity of

sensation,” an almost mystical sensibility that could cross over into the dark

reaches of space and time and transcend the scientific limitations of the

physical universe.

When we look at Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, we see that whether he

spoke of his past life, of butterfly collecting, of art, of chess or of love, of all

the things that were so close to his heart, he would always transform these

experiences by shifting them into a metaphorical mode.

The Metaphor of Loss in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory 15

Why, we may ask, was metaphor so central to Nabokov’s autobiography?

Metaphor, because of its poetic nature is a very powerful means of

expression. But because it is once removed from the actual events it can also

undercut the primary impact of these events especially if they are too painful

to absorb. I think that in Nabokov’s case, his use of metaphor allowed him

both to express but also to numb the trauma of his subjective experiences by

moving them to a more objective and less stressful metaphorical mode.

Metaphor as a distancing from an overpowering emotional experience is

known as objectification and is, in effect, a way of protecting the human

organism from the over-powering emotional impact of any subjective

traumatic experience. Günter Grass, for example, is a past master of this

kind of metaphorical protection, as we can see both in his poetry but

especially in his novel The Tin Drum.

In his wonderful and humane novel Pnin (1953), Nabokov – through

Pnin – spoke of pain as the sole reality of human existence: “The history of

man is the history of pain!”3 And, consequently, as Pnin again remarked

elsewhere: “Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really

possess?”4 Nabokov’s personal agony in Speak, Memory could only be muted

by metaphor. But though the pain was muted, the memoir as a whole in its

metaphorical guise, was able to express the pain transfigured by the author

behind the scenes. And, indeed, Nabokov could finally say with relief that

“all of a sudden, I felt that with the completion of my chess problem a

whole period of my life had come to a satisfactory close.”

3 Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 168. 4 Ibid., p. 52.