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Success is a Private Matter: Nabokov’s Christmas Stories

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Abstract

In the 1920s, during his émigré life in interbellum Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a number of Christmas stories. These stories—“Christmas,” “The Christmas Story,” and “A Reunion”—were all composed and published at Christmastime and set on the eve of Russian Christmas (first week of January). While involving the traditional motifs of the Christmas-story genre, such as the combination of joy and sorrow as well as the motifs of epiphany, gift, care, and forgiveness, these narratives expand the scope of the genre to represent not communal religious values but a private ethical stance. The purity of commitments emerges as a criterion for successful inner life. The gifts are usually the gifts of the memory, cherished in “Christmas” and “A Reunion,” and forfeited in “The Christmas Story,” as well as in a counter-story, “A Matter of Chance,” which was also written at Christmas time but set August and published with half a year’s delay.

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Notes

  1. The concept of the “Paris note” of Russian interbellum émigré literature is ascribed to the poet Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935). Its features are “pessimism, frequent references to death and boredom, solitude and anxiety, stylistic and compositional ‘simplicity,’ and confessional discourse at the expense of imagination” (Livak, 2003: 26), as well as foregrounded mystical-spiritual leanings. Brian Boyd (1990), who likewise points to Nabokov’s difference from this trend, describes “the Paris note” in terms of “the despair of exile, the anguish of the modern soul, too heartfelt to heed form and somehow truer and more sincere as its verse approached the artlessness of a diary” (344). See also Dolinin (2004: 239–45). The trend was presided over by the poet and critic Georgy Adamovich.

  2. In his Introduction to Poems and Problems Nabokov mentions “the dreary drone of the anemic ‘Paris school’ of émigré poetry” (1970: 14).

  3. I am grateful to Edward Waysband for calling my attention to this book, as well as for other important advice regarding the present article.

  4. R. H. W. Dillard (2000), whose discussion is limited to the two stories that have “Christmas” in their titles, reads the stories in terms of communal Christian rather than individual values, yet he too notes that Nabokov reinvents and expands the genre (35) of the Christmas story, which is usually characterized by a combination of sorrow and joy (37).

  5. Samuel Schuman links the theme of the mystical word to the Gospels: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1; see Schuman, 2016: 78–79). One might also recollect the poem “The Swallow” (“Lastochka”) in Osip Mandelstam’s collection Tristia published the previous year and dealing with a forgotten word (“Ya slovo pozabyl, chto ya khotel skazat’” — “The word I have forgotten that I have meant to say”). “Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men,” requests Stephen Dedalus of his mother’s ghost in Joyce’s Ulysses (682).

  6. Unless otherwise indicated, the page references are to Nabokov’s Collected Stories (Nabokov 1995).

  7. Vladimir Mylnikov (144–45) lists Sleptsov’s staying in the wing of the house rather than in its main part as belonging to the chain of the micromotifs of “the unusual” that leads up to the miracle of birth associated with the root “birth” (as in rozhdenie) in Rozhdestvo, the Russian for Christmas. Dillard (2000: 38–40) associates the motifs of miracle, death and birth in this story with Nabokov’s 1925 poem “The Mother.”.

  8. The incident is based on the untimely hatching of a hawkmoth pupa in the well-heated carriage of the train carrying the Nabokov brothers away from St. Petersburg — forever — in November 1917. Nabokov had kept this pupa in a box for seven years (see Boyd, 1990: 134–35). On taking leave of his sons at the station, V. D. Nabokov mentioned that he might never see them again; as Landa notes (2005: 280–81, 285), this was a farewell that he would not be able to make when death did come suddenly in 1922.

  9. If in his sonnet “Surprised by Joy” William Wordsworth records painful compunction after experiencing a moment of visionary joy despite the death of his little daughter several years before, in V. Sirin’s “Christmas” the gift of joy seems to lead the mourning father out of the cocoon of his grief.

  10. Nabokov repeatedly went on record criticizing Soviet fiction that he read in Berlin; see, in particular, his 1926 essay “A Few Words on the Wretchedness of Societ Fiction and an Attempt to Determine Its Cause” (2019: 40–54).

  11. On precursor Christmas stories in Russian literature see Kuzmanovich 94n3.

  12. When the protagonist of Nabokov’s “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (written in 1937) is held captive and tormented by a group of lower middle-class Germans turned thugs, he protests that this is “an invitation to a beheading” (436), echoing the title of Nabokov’s 1935 novel.

  13. The tag “spouted Serafim” replaces the more neutral “pisal Serafim” (“wrote Serafim”) in the original (1978: 140) — for the Anglophone reader Nabokov makes a clearer hint at the mechanical generation of Soviet official discourse.

  14. In 1931 Nabokov would probably not yet be aware of the starting Holodomor, the mass starvation in Ukraine which would claim millions of lives and which the Soviet government did nothing to prevent. Already then, however, he must have been aware that many of the day laborers who had worked on his family’s estate “would be cleaning streets and digging canals for the State” (1966: 80).

  15. Ruth Glancy (2018) notes that Dickens “had adopted the Christmas season” as the time best suited for forbearing thoughts (197), and that his Christmas books “did indeed inspire charitable feelings in their readers” (194).

  16. See also Lipszyc (2019: 162–65 and 168n16) on the affinities between this passage and Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on memory.

  17. See Toker (2020) on a shift in Nabokov’s moods and world view in the later 1930s.

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Toker, L. Success is a Private Matter: Nabokov’s Christmas Stories. Neophilologus 106, 349–361 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-021-09712-7

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