Major Nabokov: Three Russian Masterpieces

Abstract

During the twelve-year period from the appearance of Mashen’ka to the publication of Dar, the last novel he was to write in Russian, Nabokov produced a body of work unmatched by any twentieth-century Russian novelist. That may sound like an extravagant claim, but I think it stands up. Ivan Bunin’s fiction, although it rightly won him a Nobel Prize, does not have the range or depth of Nabokov’s. Mikhail Bulgakov is often thought of, somewhat unfairly, as the author of one immortal novel, Master i Margarita (The Master and Margarita), but even if we add in works such as Belaya gvardaya (White Guard) and Sobachie serdtse (Heart of a Dog), the verdict is clear: Nabokov had the opportunity and the ability to do more and to do it better. The other Russian writers who inevitably come to mind when such claims are being discussed, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, also won Nobel Prizes and obviously made monumental contributions to world literature. However, Pasternak is best known in his own country for his lyric poetry and translations from Shakespeare. In Solzhenitsyn, we have a writer of similar stature to Nabokov, particularly if one has no qualms about placing political novelists alongside more aesthetically minded ones. That he does not extend the possibilities of fiction in the way that Nabokov does is just as obvious. The only other serious candidate is Andrey Bely. His novels Serebryany golub (The Silver Dove), Petersburg and Kotik Letaev make him a crucially important figure in twentieth-century literature, but the effects of his anthroposophical beliefs and his attempts to adapt himself to Soviet aesthetics make the fiction he wrote in the Soviet period somewhat anti-climactic. In the end, some of these comparisons may well be invidious, because the criteria used to make such judgements are ultimately somewhat arbitrary. This is no great matter, as long as Nabokov’s achievement is given its proper due.KeywordsRussian LiteratureMoral PerceptionLyric PoetryCrime DramaForest SceneThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.