Early Russian Fiction

Abstract

Like the careers of Pushkin, Lermontov, Bely, Joyce and Faulkner, the story of Nabokov’s style begins with his accomplishments as a lyric poet. Critics mostly agree that Nabokov was not a great poet, or even a very good one, but he was certainly prolific. And precocious: his first books of verse were published when he was still a teenager. He wrote innumerable interesting poems about the idea of being in love, and he spent years producing verse that echoes in fascinating ways the work of supremely gifted nineteenth-century Russian poets, Afanasy Fet and Fyodor Tyutchev for example, and a number of poets of Russia’s Silver Age. Georgy Adamovich, one of the most exigent emigre critics, praised Nabokov’s ‘phosphoric rhymes’ with the ‘last, barely perceptible glow of Russia on them’, adding that their ‘formal mastery is inseparable from feeling, the one flowing into the other’.1 Poets’ novels often end up being more image- than plot-driven, and such writers often prove to be strikingly innovative when it comes to refashioning the novel as a form. The idea that strong emotion can work to suspend time in a moment of special apprehension on the part of a particular sort of sensibility links them together as well.