Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts by Dana Dragunoiu Anna Maslenova Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Moral Acts. By Dana Dragunoiu. (Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2021. xxi+264 pp. £73. ISBN 978–0–8101–4399–9. Dana Dragunoiu’s book is a valuable contribution to the study of Vladimir Nabokov’s ethics, reaffirming his Kantian view that the courteous treatment of others is a moral act. This book examines what its author terms ‘Nabokov’s faith in freedom’ (p. 4): the fact that Nabokov’s fictional characters are free to decide whether to conform to social standards or indulge their own passions. Dragunoiu argues that courteous gestures pertain to an anti-consequentialist moral paradigm, since they do not entail self-interest or personal gain. Her study thus shows how a critical focus on courtesy unites the ethical and aesthetic aspects of Nabokov’s texts. Taking literally Nabokov’s well-known dictum that ‘style is matter’, Dragunoiu claims that ‘Nabokov’s ethics is, startingly, an aesthetics’ and that his characters perform, or refuse to perform, ‘the art of moral acts’ (p. 12, emphasis original). Her monograph is arranged in six chapters and an Epilogue, offering a broad survey of Nabokov’s intertextual exchanges with Pushkin, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Proust on the subject of courtesy. Dragunoiu successively examines Nabokovian courtesy as performed by Mrs Luzhin (The Luzhin Defence), Helen Grinstein (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), Disa (Pale Fire), and Lucette (Ada). She analyses Mrs Luzhin’s attempt to comfort an unnamed Soviet lady, Helen Grinstein’s welcoming response to V’s visit in the middle of a funeral ceremony for her brother-in-law, Disa’s adherence to etiquette despite her grief over her husband Charles Xavier’s infidelities, and Lucette’s parting words to the Robinsons immediately before her suicide. In these cases, a heroine’s courteous behaviour serves to illustrate her virtue. Conversely, Dragunoiu also shows how discourteous behaviour indicates the moral limitations of more boorish characters such as Ganin (in Nabokov’s debut novel Mary), Pete Dean and John Shade who refuse to recognize Hazel’s individuality (Pale Fire), and Van from Ada, who falls short of the narrator’s gentlemanly and aesthetic standards. The sixth chapter is the most interesting but also the most problematic. It explores courtesy in Lolita and Pnin, considered by Dragunoiu Nabokov’s darkest novels because they reveal his loss of faith in the moral dimension of courtesy and even of art in general. Pnin does not perform his moral duty of remembering Mira Belochkin, murdered in a concentration camp. He suppresses his memories of her because his own existence is untenable in any world where crimes such as her murder can happen. In Lolita, courtesy serves to normalize the unthinkable: rape and child abuse. Humbert’s narratorial eloquence ‘underscores the functional equivalence between art and courtesy’ (p. 157). Both texts contain a ‘Holocaust subtext’ (p. 158) and resonate with Adorno’s celebrated statement that writing poetry after Auschwitz is ‘barbaric’ (cited on p. 178). Dragunoiu suggests, however, that in subsequent years ‘the memory of children burned in ovens receded from Nabokov’s imagination’ (p. 193). Thus, in Ada he reverts to his former conception of courteous gestures as moral, evident from that novel’s references to the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. One might well wonder how and whether Nabokov succeeded [End Page 736] in forgetting these terrible images. Perhaps, like Pnin, he learnt to suppress the recollection of tragedy. Dragunoiu does not offer any explanation. This study provides an extensive collection of the various expressions of courtesy in Nabokov’s novels. It would have been still more interesting if it had offered more detailed analysis of how courtesy works in a single Nabokov text, at different levels. For instance, scholars could explore whether Luzhin’s lack of courtesy—before Mrs Luzhin teaches him to kiss women’s hands—might be an expression of his moral deficiency. There are many more instances of potential interrelation between courtesy and morality in Nabokov’s fiction. [End Page 737] Anna Maslenova University of Exeter Copyright © 2022 The Modern...