Nabokov’s quartz path of memory

Abstract

Lermontov’s verse “Through the mist, the road gleams with stone” from his poem I come out to the path, alone appears as a motif of a quartz path in Nabokov’s novella Glory. This motif also makes a connection between Lermontov’s poem and Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory and novel The Gift. In this last work written in Russian, Nabokov subscribes to the romantic tradition and symbolist poetics, which highlighted the crystal as the ideal of a work of art. The basic property of the crystal is transparency, which also appears in the poems of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Osip Mandelstam as a symbol of the purity of the poetic work. Both phenomena, the quartz path as a metaphor for the poet’s journey and the crystal as a metaphor for the written work, are connected in the author’s reflection of the work of art as a time-space polyhedron permeated by memory. Nabokov perceives time as a constant division into the present and the past, as Deleuze writes about it in his book Cinéma 2. L’image-temps. The crystal becomes a metaphor for transparent work, which is also pervaded by Nabokov’s language. For Nabokov, memory resembles a film in its original meaning, a film like a fine chiffon, a thin coating of meaning. This is most evident in Nabokov’s late novella Transparent Things. The same is true of Ivanov’s collection of poems Transparency or Mandelstam’s poem The Slate Ode. In both Nabokov’s novel and Mandelstam’s poem, the act of writing becomes an act of memory.