Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions and (Less Strong) Arguments

One Big Misunderstanding

I recently finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions, a collection of the author’s interviews, essays, and letters-to-the-editor. Since the pieces were all short and written with some degree of accessibility in mind, it became my bedtime reading for a few days. The first thing of his that I read was “Lolita”, which stumbled through aged fourteen without understanding a word and thus thinking for most of it that Lo was having the time of her life.

Following that magnificent misunderstanding of Lolita, Nabokov’s interviews in isolation were what I read next. I was at an age and in an environment where I was wholly convinced of the sanctity of the Canon while at the same time not really able to say what exactly it was. I was open, in a sense, to an authoritarian or at the very least authoritative figure who seemingly knew what was what and wasn’t shy about letting me know. It’s probably for the same reason that Harold Bloom appealed at that point, even though I didn’t understand him either when I actually tried reading him. Nabokov in these sits on his great-writerly throne dispensing fireballs and lightning and very, very occasionally, a glimmer of praise.

Back then that all was very attractive – it gave me opinions so that I didn’t need to bother forming my own, and it told me what was worth reading so that I didn’t have to read either. But now, having read other writers’ (and critics’) essays, binged the back issues of the Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction”, and done a little growing up, the book that had I read it six or seven years ago might have seemed the masterwork of an assured genius, now appears in a much less pleasant light.

Structure

As I mentioned above, the book is made of interviews, letters-to-the-editor, and a few essays. The former make up most of the book, and stretch from immediately after the publication of Lolita until Ada’s own completion. The letters meanwhile include such banalities as Nabokov’s witticisms on the moon landings. While Lolita, being the most popular and enduring of his novels, takes up the main part of the interviews even long after it has been published, the essays that end the book are concerned with another book of Nabokov’s – his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The collection, it is important to note here, is one organised by Nabokov during his own lifetime – each interview, for instance, is introduced by his comments explaining the circumstances of each meeting – and for that reason it’s fair also to say that these two works are what he considers to be his primary legacy, and indeed he says as much. I’ll tackle both the interviews and essays in turn.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Great Writer, sure. But here we’re after his personality.

The Interviews

These were on the whole pretty fun, and what I was here for. Though I had read a few before, I scarcely remembered them. It also doesn’t help that Nabokov repeats himself. He has a number of metaphors and images that he uses again and again for two reasons. The first of these is that as with the rest of us, the things that are at the forefront of his mind are often similar from year to year, even if his vocabulary is undoubtedly marvellous (I quite wanted to go through it again just noting down every new and exciting word of his), and so when they are stacked side by side these interviews become a little like paintings at an art gallery. What beauty and power they have individually becomes blurred and dulled by company of equals. The same is true of Nabokov’s metaphors.

The other problem, though, is that these aren’t interviews in the strictest sense. Nabokov admits in his preface that “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child” (was there ever a more blatant instance of praising with faint damning?) and so what he does instead of speak unprompted is get his questions in advance and prepare answers to them on flashcards. It means that the whole selection has a slightly odd feeling of unreality to it – this is obviously not who Nabokov actually is in speech, but nor is he entirely who he is in his fiction either. It has an uncomfortable artificiality to it.

The Interviews: Humour and Judgement

But they are fun, and by this term I mean that they appeal in a few different ways. One of those is that the interviews are actually pretty funny. I love the hilariously awful punning of things like “I differ from Joseph Conradically” or my personal favourite “Off the Nabocuff” – things that if I said them in person I would be met with a sigh and awkward smile but when written down Nabokov almost seems to get away with. Beyond the puns there is the casual tone, such as when he calls himself “the shuttlecock above the Atlantic”, or talks of the indifferent audience he has to face whenever he lectures. All this is simple and mindless, but things become a lot more complicated when the humour is derived from his judgements about others – and it is regarding his judgements of others that the centre of my distaste for the book lies.

I imagine at least a few people read this book to know what Nabokov thinks of other writers. It’s certainly why I read the interviews all those years ago, and it remains an almost unacknowledged reason for why I still read a lot of things by other writers, especially ones that I admire. I want the literary gossip – who’s in, and who’s out. Nabokov is very good at deciding who is passé and out of style. Conrad is obliterated whenever there is a chance – “I cannot abide Conrad’s souvenir-shop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist clichés” – and anybody who writes any fiction occupied by ideas is doomed to disdain. Hemingway is merely the author of “something about bells, balls, and bulls”, though Nabokov admits to liking “the wonderful fish story”. The authors of the Soviet period are also crushed by Nabokov’s own iron fist.

Praise is left for Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and Beckett, among others. But the greater part of the interviews are concerned with criticism of fellow writers, and here it goes hand in hand with witticism rather than analysis, much to its own discredit. Aside from comments about Conrad’s childishness and sentimentality there is very little explanation of why Nabokov didn’t actually like him. Meanwhile, when praise is given it is rarely a simple matter either: Nabokov’s desire to belittle Hemingway’s output is made clear through his language (and since he wrote everything for these conversations down beforehand, Nabokov’s language is absolutely worth a little close reading) – instead of naming The Old Man and the Sea or Fiesta, Nabokov refers to them by their topics, suggesting that their names were not good enough to remain in his memory. This is in contrast to somebody like Kafka, whose “Metamorphosis” (which Nabokov refers to as “The Transformation”, a little closer to the German “Verwandlung” original) is named, or Joyce’s Ulysses. Where praise comes, it is carefully and cunningly formulated so that Nabokov never seems to be praising outright anybody he wouldn’t consider to be his equal (thus Kafka and Joyce are worthy in his mind, whatever he may state in faux-humility elsewhere). We get little from reading these parts except for a list of literary friends and enemies.

Of course, perhaps you can say that it’s wrong to expect analysis from an interview – I’d grant that. But mere witticisms are far less helpful than even the pithiest of analytical comments.

The Interviews: the Nabokov Show

For those people interested in Nabokov himself, these interviews admittedly do contain a wealth of information. On his compositional methods: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well-sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.” He includes a detailed description of his daily routine too, but for those who seek the secrets of success there is likely only disappointment: Nabokov spends a lot of time walking, drinking tea, and playing Russian Scrabble.

We also learn what he read as a child, and what has fallen in and out of fashion with him as he has aged: “Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok” are his childhood’s occupation, while “Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin” gain ascendency once he is into his twenties, thirties, and forties. We are told that Lolita only survived being incinerated after an intervention by his wife, Vera, and a little bit about his life in Berlin and France before he reached America. Biographical details, simply put, but nonetheless interesting if that is to your taste.

The Interviews: A Cutting Edge

Nabokov wrote, by common admission, pretty good fiction, and when he wants to in these interviews he can well deploy that power of insight which contributes a great deal towards his reputation, just rarely. It is here too, that his strong opinions are most useful, for they allow him to say boldly what others might not. He is at his most interesting when discussing themes also addressed in his novels and stories. When discussing how we view reality he imagines it in a series of steps: “reality is a very subjective affair… a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist”. He also talks about memory, the ways that the past changes as we grow older and begin to focus on different aspects of it – “The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is”. Less interesting is his dismissal of Soviet fiction in its entirety as mere banality – though much of it was, his answer lacks a lot of nuance and could conceal from a reader the value of what was produced in the Soviet Union in terms of writing. One thing I did agree with though was his statement about Osip Mandel’shtam, the Russian poet, whose death in the camps Nabokov states makes his poetry look better now than it would do otherwise, good as it is. This is close to my own experience of him too, but I’m keeping my mind open since I’ve not read as much as I’d have liked to.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), whose novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin details the tragically aimless life of its eponymous hero.

The Onegin Affair – Introduction and Background

The interviews at their best are a collection of witticisms and occasional insights into their author’s talent and creative process; at their worst they are rude an unfounded criticisms of others with nary an analysis in sight. The majority of the essays in the second half of the book deal with Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and unfortunately they are much oftener similar to the bad interviews than to the good ones. Nabokov’s version of Pushkin’s novel in verse was first published in 1964, and included as an appendix a section on prosody differences between English and Russian – for both works (“Notes on Prosody” was published separately later) he met with fierce opposition, and responded equally fiercely. His own translation was written in accordance with his own views on the act of translation, expounded among the interviews and in the essays too. That view was one of extreme literalism. Nabokov wanted every word to be translated exactly according to its meaning, so that works translated from a foreign language ought to sound strange, precisely because they are not being adapted or smoothed over for their new audience. It makes them clunky but according to Nabokov also much more correct. It’s not a debate to get into here, but needless to say the style of his version of Pushkin’s work raised a few hackles among academia and the wider public.

The Onegin Affair – the Nature of the Defence

Nabokov, way back when, used to be good friends with the literary critic Edmund Wilson. During the course of the affair things between them got a little heated, and a sort of mangled retelling of all this is possible by looking through the essays and following up a few of the references within them. The key essay is the fourth one, “Reply to my Critics”, which is “a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest” but mostly the latter two. Nabokov takes to task a huge number of minor denizens of the academy who have been critical of him, before rounding on Mr Wilson in particular. Wilson, in his own article, had begun by stating that he and Nabokov were old friends, but ones whose affection was “sometimes chilled by exasperation.” Nabokov, nonetheless, rounds on him. Where Wilson suggests he has “an addiction to rare and unfamiliar words” Nabokov arrogantly responds that “it does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey”. Elsewhere, he compares him to “some seventeenth-century pedant discoursing on high and low style”.

But beyond these criticisms of tone and personality, Nabokov also states that Wilson has no right to complain about his writing because Wilson is actually bad at Russian – which as a language learner is among the most offensive things you can be told. Nabokov acts in such a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation – he says himself that “my facts are objective and irrefutable” even as they are simply more and more opinions disguised as facts by a grandiose prose style. He is rude and, if not often wrong, then at least far less “right” than he seems to think he is. When Wilson tried to make things good again between them, saying that his article was “more damaging” than he had intended, Nabokov, instead of accepting the apology merely rubbed salt in the wounds by saying “his article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation”. In one of the letters-to-the-editor written later, Nabokov once more dismisses the possibility of making up with his old friend, writing “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honour the latter wins.” The very next year Wilson was dead.

This may all sound ridiculous. In a sense, after all, I’m just criticising Nabokov’s personality. But when we read interviews and essays, at least outside of an academic context, part of their appeal comes from the way they somehow contain the essence of their authors. Nabokov’s personality does not appeal to me – I would even go so far as to say that he should little appeal to anybody. He is cruel, insistently so, and arrogant beyond all measure. He may well have assembled this collection hoping to impress his readers, but anyone with unclouded vision will instead see whatever idol they’ve constructed for him crumble with each passing page. We rarely read fiction for the personality of a work’s creator (excepting, for example, the Beats) because the text is rarely so autobiographical that we cannot move beyond the author’s experience, if the work is good enough, into something exciting and more universal. But here Nabokov’s personality is overwhelming, and overwhelmingly toxic. Other essays just take aim at differing people who have annoyed him over the years, such as Robert Lowell and Maurice Girodias, and are just as tiresome.

Montreux in Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his later years.

Rays of Light

For that reason, the best parts of the book are where Nabokov is doing something similar to telling a story and his own person takes a back seat. One of the letters-to-the-editor recounts the death of his father shortly after the family had arrived in Berlin. At the end of the book Nabokov details some expeditions in search of rare butterflies. In both instances we can enjoy the texts as independent of the personality created them. Another time where the book takes a turn for the better, and for me the most frustrating moment, is in the article on the Russian poet Vladimir Hodasevich (Khodasevich). It is a rare incidence of praise, and the only essay here that he translated from the original Russian work he did before coming to America. It includes the line “even genius does not save one in Russia; in exile, one is saved by genius alone”, which sounds rather good if nothing else. But it is annoying because essays like this, where Nabokov turns your eyes towards writers you hadn’t considered or even heard of, are almost non-existent here. In one of the interviews he famously declares Andrei Bely’s Petersburg as one of the four great masterpieces of the 20th century, which almost singlehandedly brought about that book’s revival and appreciation in the West. But again, that’s two new authors after a whole book’s worth of vitriol.

Conclusion

It is not easy to do, by any stretch of the imagination, but once one tears oneself away from the fancy prose style and the enchantments of his undoubtedly beautiful and charming language, the book offers far less than perhaps might be expected, based on Nabokov’s colossal reputation. The revelations are few and far between, and not even the sparkling of nice words can disguise the insipid cruelty of which he gives every indication of being proud. We may read criticism to watch our literary temples be torn down as much as we want to see them be built up, but Nabokov rarely undermines the foundations of what he attacks – instead he simply slings mud and insults at them until the walls are stained brown, but ultimately left easy enough to wipe clean. Rarely do we learn why things are bad, only that Mr Nabokov thinks they are. We do get the odd bit of insight into Nabokov’s life and times, but that’s not enough to redeem the book. It is a failure underneath the prose.

If you are after analysis, take a look at his lectures or book on Gogol’. If you are after style and an entertaining story that is not dripping with nastiness, he wrote plenty of fiction to keep you busy. But this… this is just a disappointment. Better to stay away.

For Nabokov in a much more enjoyable guise, I have a piece on Pnin, over here.

Picture of Vladimir Nabokov by Walter Mori (Mondadori Publishers) is in the public domain.

Portrait of Alexander Pushkin is by Orest Kiprensky and in the public domain

Photo of Montreux is by Nserrano and used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

A Righteous Man by Nikolai Leskov

Since I finished reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller”, which I discuss here, I have been meaning to read some Leskov, and translate it as well if it weren’t too hard. I’m not sure whether the piece I chose was necessarily the best introduction, but I found it very funny, and hope I conveyed that a little in the translation. A few comments of my own follow the main text.

A Righteous Man – Nikolai Leskov

A Vision at Midnight

I have heard it said often and indeed several times read it too: that he has “vanished” – “the righteous man” has vanished, and he has vanished not only completely without a trace, but also without any hope of ever finding him again in Russia. This is grave news, and at the same time one didn’t quite want to believe it. Perhaps, though, the matter depends more on those people who are seeking him: they are looking even though they don’t know how to find such a “righteous man”. All this makes me remember the old vaudeville “A Peaceful Night in Sherbakovii Lane”. There, if I remember right, there was a couplet, going thus:

“And even on Sherbakovii Lane

You could find a goodly soul.”

What that means is that the author of this piece knew how to find “a good man” even in such a small and dirty lane as that one. And so, how could it be the case that there cannot be found in all of Russia but one “righteous man”? And what sort of justness are we expecting from this “righteous man” anyway? That he “in the face of social injustice finds within himself courage and determination to say publicly to the people: “You are making a mistake and are going on the path of error – but look: here is the path to righteousness”?”

I am citing this from an article I found in one public news organ whose name I feel no need to mention. I can vouch but one thing: that these printed words I have just repeated seemed to a great many to be deeply true. But I remained biased against them. I believed that a righteous man still survived, somewhere out there, and that I would soon meet him – and indeed I did. I saw him in a battle with the whole of society, which he strove to defeat on his own and without fear. This is how it happened.

It was the summer that has just passed by. I had left Petersburg with one rather devout friend, who had enticed me to have a look at a big religious celebration out in the country. The way there wasn’t particularly long or tiresome: one cool evening we sat down in a carriage in Petersburg, and the next morning we were already at the place. And within half an hour of crossing the threshold my religious friend had already quarrelled with some church sexton or other! (He had apparently said something disrespectful to him).

When evening came it found both of us in our room and my fellow traveller sitting and busily writing a letter of complaint back to the capital about this poor man, so I went down to breathe some fresh air and also have a look at what exactly it was that people got up to out here. I was accompanying an easy-going artist I had met who said he’d come here to “read his scenes” to the public.

At such an hour back home in Petersburg all respectable people are busy, as is well known, out in restaurant gardens eating, and here it turned out that people were doing just the same. It thus happened, then, that we landed without any misunderstandings right in the public garden, where my acquaintance, the artist, was supposed to be showing off his talents.

He wasn’t a newcomer like me – he knew a lot of people here, and they knew him too.

The garden, into which we had arrived, was rather large for a provincial town, though it was rather similar to a mere boulevard from my perspective. In any case, to the left there were entrances to the place where this evening there happened to be a paid concert going on, as a result everything was closed off. The paying public went through a single middle way, shaped like a concave semicircle. Around the gates were placed plank booths for selling tickets, and a number of policemen and idlers were standing there too, the latter having no chance of getting through to the garden due to lacking the necessary funds.

In front of this entrance to the main garden there was a small front garden, but I couldn’t tell what it was growing or why it was here and fenced round in the first place. Its relation to the larger garden was like that of a waiting room in a bathhouse to the baths themselves.

The artist went through according to his “special right”, while I bought a ticket, and we entered through the gates to the accompaniment of the Skobelevskii March[1], after which there were cheers of “hoorah” and new demands for the exact same thing again.  

The public were out in great numbers, and all of them were pressed together on a small lawn, in the corner of which there was a wooden restaurant, made to look like a pagan temple. On one side of it a summer theatre had been erected from wood panels, and this was where the performance was now taking place and where a little while later my Petersburg orator ought to be doing his readings. Meanwhile, on the other side there was the “shell” where the military band was located and busy playing the march.

The society here clearly belonged to several different ranks: there were petty councillors, officers from the army, merchants and the “grey people” of the petty bourgeoisie. In the more obvious places were packed the traders, while in a far corner a regimental clerk and a certain sort of woman were hanging around.

Decrepit little tables covered by dirty cloths had been haphazardly thrown about, all inconveniently near to one another and all of them occupied. The people cheerfully gave me a public demonstration of what exactly it was they did here. In great demand it seemed was tea, beer, and vodka, although they called the latter “Simple person’s wine”, as if it would sound more respectable that way. Only in one place did I notice someone who was managing himself in a way suggestive of greater wealth: before him stood a bottle of champagne and cognac, and a teapot with boiling water for making punch. There were rather a lot of empty glasses around him, but he was at that moment sitting alone.

This guest had a remarkable appearance which soon thrust itself upon one’s sight. For one, he was gigantic, with a thicket of thick hair which already had flashes of grey in it among the black. His dress was extraordinarily elaborate, colourful, and tasteless. He was wearing a bright and deep blue linen shirt with a high upturned and starched collar. On his neck a white foulard with brown spots was carelessly hung, and over his shoulders was slung a jacket in the Manchester style. Then, on his chest was an extraordinarily massive golden chain with a diamond and a great number of dangling pendants. Even in terms of his footwear he was extremely original: he had on his feet such low boots that one might sooner have taken them for slippers, and between them and his pantaloons flashed bright stripped red cotton socks, just as if he had scratched his legs until they bled.

He was sitting at the biggest table, which was placed in the very best location – just beneath a large old lime tree for shade – and it seemed that he was in a state of nervous agitation.

The artist, who had accompanied me thus far, as soon as he saw this most original specimen squeezed my hand quietly and murmured to me:

“Well, well, well. Now this is something unexpected!”

“Who is he?”

“This, my dear friend, is a subject[2] of the finest sort.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that he is extremely curious. This is Martin Ivanich – a nobleman, merchant, and extremely prosperous fellow and an absolute nutcase to boot. In common parlance among our people he is often known as “Martin the righteous”, because he loves to tell everyone the truth. His fame, just like that of Ersha Ershovich[3], has spread along every river and port of our dear Russia. And he is not without an education either – he knows a lot of Pushkin and Griboedov[4] by heart, and if you get him to have a drink he’ll start to draw upon “Woe from Wit” or something from Gogol. Indeed, it looks as though he’s already started with his spree – he’s already sitting without his hat.”

“Well, it has gotten hot.”

“No – he always brings another bottle with him hidden under his hat, just in case they refuse to give him any more at the buffet.”

The artist stopped a lackey, just at that minute going past, and asked: “Has Martin Ivanovich got a bottle underneath his hat?”

“Sir… I don’t know what you mean…”

“Well, that means he’s ready,” the artist turned back to me, “and soon we two will witness a righteous performance of the most unexpected and noblest sort. We ought to go and have a chat with him.”

The artist went towards Martin Ivanovich and I trudged after him, stopping close by so as to observe their meeting.

The artist stopped in front of Martin and, after taking off his own hat, with a smile said: “I bow to your honour.”

Martin Ivanovich in response to this extended a hand to him and immediately brought him down onto the empty chair next to him, then answered:

“”I beg you to join me” – this said Sobakevich[5]”

“But I don’t want to,” Uttered my friend, but at that moment a glass of punch was already sitting before him, and Martin once more repeated the quote.

“I beg you to join me” – said Sobakevich.”

“No, truly I cannot. I have to go and read now.”

Martin poured out the punch onto the ground and muttered some unpleasantry or other befitting a Nozdrev[6].

I didn’t much like this – I understood why everybody ran away from this antique. As an original he certainly was an original, but it seemed to me that within him was contained not only the character of Sobakevich, but also Konstantin Konstandzhoglo[7], who boiled fish with their skins still on. Only, this Konstandzhoglo now had drunk a little more and in an even less pleasant mood he began to slag off the whole of society. He talked of how they “all are wretches and scoundrels”; and when the public once again demanded the Skobelevskii March he suddenly stood up without a cause and shushed the lot of them.

“Why’d he do that?” I asked my friend as he fled the vicinity.

“Because he is now going to cast a little righteousness in their direction. But anyway, we should head into the theatre.”

I left with my friend and made myself comfortable in his dressing room. We sang, read, and once more went out into the garden.

The spectacle was finished. The public had markedly thinned out and, as they were leaving, once more demanded the same Skobelevskii March. Without difficulty we found ourselves a table, but luckily or unluckily we had ended up right next to our Martin Ivanovich again. He, while we had been away, had managed to increase his sensibility still further, and his sense of justice, it appeared, now demanded a vocal stand from him. He now no longer sat, but stood and declaimed not poetry, but a prose excerpt which really made you admit that he was very well-read for someone of his milieu. He was rolling off from memory phrases from the praised word of Zakharov[8] to Catherine, which was located in “Considerations on the Matter of New and Old Style”.

“”Suvorov[9], so spoke Catherine, show us! He rose like a tumultuous whirlpool and he blasted the Turks from their guarded borders; like a hawk he fell upon his prey. Whoever he saw he sent to flight; whoever he met he conquered; and to whomever he brought his thunder he annihilated. There were none who escaped. Europa herself was left trembling… and…””  

But just at that moment the public once more demanded the Skobelevskii March, and once the orchestra had started fulfilling this request it was no longer possible to discern whatever Martin Ivanovich was declaiming. Only when the march had finished did his words reach us again:

““-Thus, must we honour our forebears and never think too highly of our own poor selves!””

What is this man trying to get at?” I asked my friend.

“Verily, verily, my good fellow, he is trying to achieve his justice.”

“What does he want it for now?”

“For him it is essential: the man is righteous, and you can see it on his face. Look look…” The storyteller finished, and I saw that Martin Ivanovich had suddenly stood up from his place and with rapid if tipsy steps had gone after an older man in military uniform who at that moment just happened to be walking past.

Martin Ivanovich caught up with this stranger (who happened to be the bandmaster of the orchestra), grabbed him from behind by the collar and shouted: “”No, no, you shan’t get away from me” – so said Nozdrev”.

The bandmaster smiled with a look of embarrassment but asked that he be released.

“No, I shall not let you go,” Answered Martin Ivanovich. “You are tormenting me!” And he forced him down towards the table and shouted again: “Drink to the insult to our affronted forebears and the darkness now covering our future descendants!”

“Who did I insult?”

“Who? Me, Suvorov, and all the righteous people of our land!”

“I didn’t think I… I wasn’t suggesting to…”

“Then for what in God’s name were you playing that itch of a march for the entire evening long?”

“The public requested it.”

“You are tormenting me with this injustice.”

“The public requested it.”

“Despise the public, then, if they are unjust!”

“What is this injustice you are going on about?”

“Why aren’t you playing Suvorov’s March, eh?”

“The public did not request it.”

“I suggest you clear up the matter with them. Play the Skobelevskii March once, then Suvorov’s March twice, because he waged war more than him. Yes! Now I shall let you go – head back right at this moment and play Suvorov’s March!”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no such thing as Suvorov’s March.”

“How could there be no march for Suvorov? “Suvorov, spoke Catherine, show us how it’s done! He blew things up, swooped down upon them, destroyed them, conquered them, gave a shake to Europa!…” and you’re saying he doesn’t have a march?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“The public hasn’t requested one.”

“Aha! Well, I will show them what’s what!”

And Martin Ivanovich suddenly let go of the bandmaster, stood up on top of the table and cried out: “You public! You are unfair, and what’s more, you are a pig!”[10]

Everything suddenly grew noisy and people started moving about, while near the table where Martin Ivanovich the Righteous was continuing his speech a policeman had appeared and was now demanding that the orator lower himself back to the ground. Martin did not comply. He defended himself by kicking about with his legs and loudly continued to reproach everyone for their injustice towards Suvorov. He finished with a challenge for a duel, throwing down one of his shoes instead of a glove. A couple of townsfolk who had come to the rescue grabbed at his legs, but they couldn’t put an end to the mayhem: into the air there flew yet another boot, the entire table flipped over, and the sounds of smashing cutlery could be heard alongside the splashing of water and cognac… in a word, it was a right mess… at the buffet table for some reason the lights all momentarily went out and a everyone began a stampede towards the exit, while on their platform the musicians decided have a go playing their finale: “Only Gloried is our God in Zion.”[11]

My friend and I joined the handful of curious ones who had not rushed to leave and were now awaiting the denouement. We were all tightly packed in that place were the police were trying to restrain Martin Ivanovich, who was still managing to keep them off him and all the time was heroically defending the matter, crying: “Catherine spoke: Suvorov, show us… Explosions, swooping, annihilation, shaking!”

And then he was silent, either because he was tired or because something had finally managed to interrupt him.

In the darkness that now followed it was hard to see who had a hold of whom, but then the voice of the righteous man resounded anew: “Stop strangling me: I am on the side of righteousness!”

“There isn’t any justice here” Said the policeman.

“I am not speaking to you, but to the whole of society!”

“Maybe if you just go over here…”

“And I will go – but only get your hands off – come on! I’m going… hands off! No need to embrace me.”

“Gentlemen, please move out of the way.”

“I am not scared… Why is there no march for Suvorov?”

“Go complain to the justice of the peace.”

“And I will complain! Suvorov conquered more!”

“The justice will decide the matter.”

“The justice is an idiot! Where is that devil of a man to learn about it?”

“Well just wait and see!… it’s all in the protocol.”

“Well I’m not scared of your justice. I’m going!” Martin shouted. He threw off the arms of the policemen and went with big steps towards the exit. He was still not wearing any shoes – he was walking with only those multicoloured socks…

The police didn’t keep off and tried to encircle him.

From among the rows of the public who were still there someone cried out: “Martin Ivanovich, go and find your shoes… you need to put something on your feet.”

He stopped for a moment, but then he waved his hands and carried on, shouting: “It’s nothing… if I am a righteous man then I should be walking like this. Justice always walks without boots.”

At the gates they forced Martin into a carriage with a policeman and then they drove off.

The public then went off to wherever each of them needed to be.

“Well, all things considered, his reasoning was just,” Said one stranger to another as they overtook us.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just like he said – Suvorov conquered more than Skobolev after all – why shouldn’t they have played his march?”

“There isn’t an arrangement.”

“So that’s your injustice right there.”

“Eh, shut up. It’s not for us to bother with it. Maybe the justice of the peace will have to worry about it, but not you. Who cares about being just or not?”

My friend took me by the arm and whispered: “If you want to know – this is the real truth.”

While I was getting undressed in my room I heard two people going along the corridor, quietly discussing something. They decided to part ways by the entrance to the room next door and finished with the following: “Well, however you want to look at it, in his drunken state there was some justice alright.”

“Yes, well, maybe you’re right, but the devil was in it too.”

And they wished each other good night.

[1] Mikhail Dmitrievich Skobelev (1843-1882), recently deceased at the time the story takes place, had been a successful general during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

[2] The Russian has “suzhekt” a pun on “sub’ekt” meaning a subject, and “syuzhet”, meaning a plot.

[3] Ersha Ershovich was a character in a popular satire of the 17th Century

[4] Pushkin is the most famous Russian writer, equivalent in stature to Shakespeare in English. Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov (1795-1829) was a diplomat, poet, and dramatist. His comedy “Woe from Wit” is extremely popular in Russia and has had a huge influence on literature ever since its publication.

[5] A character in Gogol’s Dead Souls.

[6] Nozdrev is a character in Dead Souls as well. He is two-faced and superficial.

[7] See note 5

[8] I. S. Zakharov was a famously good stylist according to the work mentioned

[9] A V Suvorov was general under Catherine, and among the most well-known generals of the Imperial period altogether. Far more important that Skobelevskii.

[10] “You are swine” is another translation, but I thought using pig was more funny. In the Russian he is speaking to the public as if it were an individual, including using the second-person singular form of “you”.

[11] A religious hymn by M. M. Kheraskov

Comments and (brief) Analysis

As I mentioned above, this is the first Leskov piece I’ve read, so there’s only so much I can say about it. He’s not a particularly well-known writer outside of his homeland, and then only for “Lady Macbeth of Mtensk”. He writes simply, and that gives me an advantage translating the piece, because I have less recourse to the dictionary or my Russian friends. Still, I hadn’t anticipated Martin Ivanovich’s quotes when I started reading, and they were a bit trickier to translate – I did need help for those, because the Russian is much older than what I’m used to, being as it was from the 18th century.

Nikolai Leskov around the time this story was written. Doesn’t he look like a man with plenty of yarns to spin?

More useful, probably, is to explain a few of the ways the story connects to Benjamin’s ideas of storytelling.

For one, the story is recounted as if it were a story from real life – and indeed, Leskov is recounting a largely real event, according to the notes in his collected works. The narrator explains how they heard about the story then tells the story itself, which is simply an event. He also tries to frame it, in the beginning, within moral questions. That is, the story has a moral – another key element for Benjamin. It is trying to tell us something, most obviously that there are still righteous people out there, though they may seem strange to us.

The story is also written simply. The language is of a low register, and indeed in recounting the speech of people the narrator even veers into coarse day-to-day language of the time. He doesn’t try to explain actions, or provide justifications – he lets the characters speak for themselves, and then the reader find their moral. Because of the lack of a psychological level – another distinguishing characteristic of stories as opposed to novels – there is a layer of ambiguity. Are we to treat Martin Ivanovich as a truly righteous person, or is there more irony involved? These questions depend on how the story is told – with each retelling, a narrator could focus on one or the other.

Though it is true that this is a story in a book, and thus it lacks some of the other traits that oral stories would, it nonetheless serves as a kind of base, which through real-life retellings, could be shaped and moulded into a truer story. Perhaps you, reader, could pass it off as one of your own experiences, the next time you find yourself enjoying an evening with your friends, and see what they think. 🙂

Zorba the Greek and the Ambiguities of Affirmation

Introduction: Kazantzakis and his novel’s Reputation

Zorba the Greek was the novel of Nikos Kazantzakis that I least wanted to read. I had come across its author in a round about way as I rambled through Wikipedia page after Wikipedia page, probably procrastinating something, until at last I stumbled upon a reference to his novel Christ Recrucified. With a title like that there was no leaving that link blue, and I soon discovered to my horror that one of my dearest ideas for a novella of my own had already found expression in the work of a Greek man, Nikos Kazantzakis. It soon became obvious that my idea-making was not in vain, and that actually our stories were only superficially similar. This led me to the man himself who – this much I could tell already – was an author whose thematic concerns were similar to my own. Something of a literary friendship, or at the very least an alliance, could be salvaged from the wreckage.

A picture of Nikos Kazantzakis from the Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum. Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

Nikos Kazantzakis had an extremely rich life. Born in 1883 in Heraklion on the island Crete while it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, in 1907 he began his travelling. By the end of his life he had visited France, Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, Spain, the Near and Far East, and much of north Africa, working in various jobs including being a journalist and translator. He met Mussolini, admired Lenin, despised Stalin and at one time or another seemed to have had every view in every shade that was popular in his turbulent times, before dying in 1957. But most importantly of his views, he had a profound interest in trying to find something he could believe in, which is evident from the title and beyond of every single thing he wrote.

Zorba the Greek has a reputation for being “one of the great life-affirming novels of our time” – so says the blurb of my edition. This naturally put me off the book before I’d even bought it, as being made happy is very low on my list of priorities when it comes to deciding what to read next. However, it was the only work by Kazantzakis that was in either of the big bookstores in Cambridge, so I didn’t have much choice. And as it turned out, the thing that struck me as the book drew to a close and that continues to bother me now is just how much more ambiguous its contents seem than the blurb’s cheeriness would indicate. This is no mere exercise in standing naked on the top of hills.

The Plot

What happens is simple. The whole book is really a series of largely unconnected events which happen to the narrator, an intellectual who is trying to become more experienced in the workings of the world itself, and the titular Zorba. While waiting for a boat to Crete to start a mining operation there the unnamed narrator meets an old man, Zorba, who offers his services to him, having been a miner himself. The narrator accepts, and the two of them begin their adventures. They meet the locals of a small village including Madame Hortense, an old French lady, the widow, an alluring woman, and uncle Anagnosti, the village elder. The two of the men, alongside workers from the village, build their mine, and in the evenings Zorba relates stories of his life, and his now-famous worldview. But eventually there are money problems which even Zorba’s hairbrained schemes are unable to solve, and finally the two are forced to leave the village and each other. On the material side of things, that’s all there is – a collection of escapades and affairs. But there is another level of plot – the mental. Here, the book describes the narrator’s internal conflicts over the organisation of his own life and his beliefs. A tentative Buddhist at first, he soon finds his book-learning challenged by Zorba’s own way of life.

Zorba and his Way of Life

And what is Zorba’s way of life? Life-affirmation is a good starting point. At a few points he describes himself as being filled with “demons”. He lives according to his whims, eternally on the move and doing different jobs and meeting new and different people. Food, and music, and women, are what he lives for. Or rather, he doesn’t live for anything at all – early on he shouts “Can’t a man do anything without a why?”. It is the day-to-day pleasures of life that attract him, with questions of meaning of the sort that trouble the narrator and plenty of other people in our own world not even coming into his head. He has his views on religion, but they are inevitably blasphemous, simple, and conducive to letting him avoid worrying about them. Several times he announces that God and the devil are one and the same. At others he claims that he lives as though he expects to die in the very next minute. He resembles Nietzsche at his cheeriest, but with added innocence, and also Walt Whitman, whose words “I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing” could just as readily have come from this Greek’s mouth.

Picture of Cretan Beach Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]
The island of Crete where the action takes place. The sea is a prominent image

Zorba’s worldview is also intimately connected to the language and style of the book. Kazantzakis was one of the first major Greek authors to use Demotic Greek – the language of the common people – instead of Katharevousa – a conservative and prestigious literary form of Greek which was designed to bridge Ancient Greek and its Demotic variant. The language of the book is, as a result, as simple as Zorba himself, even in translation. Sentences are short and images are generally natural or associated with manual labour – that is, they are human rather than bookish. The lush descriptions of the sea and rural life on Crete also help encourage the reader to reflect on their interaction with the natural world, mediated as it so often is nowadays through windows and electronic screens. Zorba himself also often speaks in stories that have something of the parable about them, such as when he retells the history of Zeus’s infidelities as a continuous list of incidences of pity sex.

Women: the Dark Side of Affirmation

And this is where the problems for the modern reader start. A casual look at the top reviews on Goodreads paints a conflicted picture of the book, and pretty much all of the complaints centre on the work’s treatment of its female characters, or at least Zorba’s view of them. For Zorba, like Nietzsche, believed that women were not capable of the life-affirmation and strength that a man is. To the Greek they are stupid, pitiable, wild beasts just waiting for a man to show a sexual interest in them – pity, rather than hate, seems the main emotion here. At one point he declares that all you need to do to get into bed with a woman is to grab her by the breast. Zorba, in relating his travels, mentions several past wives, several other chance encounters each lasting a few months, several abandoned or deceased children. For him this is all positive. The way he describes the women, it sounds like they had a good time too. But within the story proper the Frenchwoman, Madame Hortense, falls in love with him and expects him to marry her after he and she spend time together, forcing the narrator to make all sorts of excuses when Zorba goes off to another village for two weeks and writes about his relationship with a new girl over there. When he gets back, Zorba is frustrated by his need to play along and marry the girl. Eventually they do marry, but only as Hortense is dying of an illness, saving himself the problem of being tied down. In his interaction with women a dark and deceitful side of Zorba’s character is made clear.

Unchallenged Misogyny?

Zorba’s life affirmation is obviously good for his own life and confidence. And in the world of the book his views on women bring him plenty of adventures in bedchambers. But to me it is frustrating, because it denigrates women and hardly seems fair that he should, like a vampire, gain his strength from the mistreatment of others. Kazantzakis doesn’t openly criticise this side of Zorba, but I would at least like to argue that the book itself is not wholly supportive of the message of misogyny, at least if you exercise a little empathy. There are two female characters who are important here – the mysterious widow, and Madame Hortense. Hortense is the one first introduced. She is a Frenchwoman who has ended up on Crete after a life of adventure, visiting many of the cities of the Orient, conducting illicit affairs with many varieties of Ottoman officialdom. On Crete itself she met and bedded members of the great powers of Europe, who had convened to discuss the Cretan revolt against Ottoman rule, but now her looks are gone, and she lives alone, dreaming of a legitimate sexual encounter through marriage.

Hortense has done what Zorba has done – worked and travelled the world. But her work and travel have become intricately linked to her sexual attractiveness, and once she has aged, she has become worthless in the eyes of society. Zorba, meanwhile, is sixty-five by his own reckoning, and still virile and hard-working. The similarities between Zorba and Hortense may seem superficial, but they are enough to show the frustrating situation for women who wanted to live like Zorba in those days. She is pitiable, because she has decided to believe that her self-worth comes only from her beauty, and now finds herself rejected by society. It seems to me that the book is critical of the way in which women cannot live like Zorba, even as it allows him to preach and ramble unimpeded.

The critical attitude goes to even greater heights in the character of the widow. Unnamed, she becomes her status as a once-married woman. Widows have traditionally been seen as sexually pernicious precisely because they no longer possess the sexual naivety of the unmarried ingenue, and are also no longer restrained in their desires by the figure of their husbands – and it is this view of widowhood that informs her portrayal here. Lusted after by the whole village, she eventually sleeps with the narrator in a moment when his own self-control lapses. But shortly afterwards she is attacked in broad daylight because of her refusal to be with another Greek and decapitated in what is surely the book’s most horrible moment. The narrator is horrified at this barbarity. As with Hortense but even more explicitly, rural Cretan society is revealed to be monstrous towards women. And it is unlikely that a reader of any time would see this without demanding some kind of change.

The Narrator and the Other Revolt

Actually though, the narrator is who I first thought of when I began to challenge the simple affirmations of the book’s blurb. He is, unlike Zorba, a young man and an educated and successful one at that: early on he mentions carrying around a copy of Dante, and he also corresponds with two friends, both of whom are living in accordance with a more educated worldview – the first man has gone to the Caucasus to try to rescue the ethnic Greek population that then lived there, while the second is in charge of a colonial venture in part of British Africa. The narrator, however, has abandoned his book learning temporarily to try out a capitalist mining venture on Crete. He knows little about mining and Zorba is entirely in charge of that operation for him. What he himself does is think, and think, and think. He is attracted by Buddhism, which in its portrayal here means a rejection of all desires and a cultivation of the spiritual life – all of this is the complete opposite of Zorba, and the two world views regularly clash. The narrator is trying to write a manuscript on Buddhism, and as he moves ever closer to Zorba’s views he begins to see the completion of the work as a sort of exorcism of that side of himself. At times he says he is happy, most often in the contemplation of nature, but at others he falls into a deep melancholy. He seems happier to philosophise than to live himself: “I was happy and said to myself: this is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them.” It is typical that the very next paragraph begins like this: “The days were passing by. I tried to put a brave face on it, I shouted and played the fool, but in my heart of hearts I knew I was sad.”

Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
A santuri – one such instrument is Zorba’s pride and joy. In Nietzschean terms Zorba is very much a Dionysian character – primal, musical, and unbridled – in contrast to the narrator’s education, literariness and self-restraint.

In much the same way, he claims that Zorba has changed him, and yet nothing changes. An intellectual, he entertains the new ideas, but puts into practice nothing. The one moment when desire gets the better of him and he submits to the widow’s attentions, her death only reinforces his reluctance to do anything. He listens to Zorba, and talks in his turn, but that is all. His great decision to actually try to run a mine leads to failure, while in Georgia and Africa his two friends pursue lives of action with much more success. The adventurer in the Caucasus is driven by a profound nationalism and love of his people, while the one in Africa is driven by a hatred for society and a desire to live apart from it. But both of them have put their beliefs into practice, while the narrator does nothing of the sort. Zorba, after their separation, tries to persuade him to come and see a marvellous green stone he has found – a useless object but the perfect example of the pure excitement and love for the natural world he has – in vain. The narrator doesn’t go, and later receives information of Zorba’s death.

Conclusion: the Ambiguities of Affirmation

The narrator decides to write down all that Zorba said or did, a sort of hagiographical record, once he hears of his friend’s demise – the book itself. The final note of the novel is the news from the family that he died with that Zorba has left the narrator his santuri, the stringed instrument that Zorba derives much of his musical power and essence from. It is absolutely a positive and uplifting ending – I wrote a smiley face next to the paragraph in my copy. But at the same time, I’m not sure what to make of it. The narrator hasn’t changed, really. All he has achieved is the recording of another, happier, stronger man. Both Zorba and the friend in the Caucasus have died, leaving the mopey Buddhist alone with beliefs he cannot even rely on anymore. What does all that say about us? Most of the people reading Kazantzakis nowadays, at least outside of Greece, are likely to be closer to the narrator than to Zorba – educated and ineffectual like me. No doubt what Zorba says is motivational and exciting, but how much affirmation are we supposed to get out of a book that suggests that if we can’t find ourselves a real Zorba, there’s little chance we’ll be able to grow one within us?

In any case, the book is fun, easy to read, and in its own blasphemous way profound. Zorba is an inspirational character and his travels and world views certainly motivate me to do more, even as I am left uncomfortable by his misogyny. But like the narrator, in practice I probably won’t do anything different. Though I absolutely intend to read more Kazantzakis in the future, for anybody who might come to this in search for a simple and unqualified message of affirmation for all life, women included, I might have to point them towards dear old Whitman instead.

For some gloom to go with your affirmation and to make it easier to appreciate how lucky we all really are, I have a piece on Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag system here. For more Kazantzakis, I have a piece on Report to Greco here.

Picture of Kazantzakis by Μουσείο N. Καζαντζάκη / Kazantzakis Museum. Used under CC 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Picture of Crete by Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)],

Picture of santuri by Villanueva [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]