Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic: A Study of His Novels and Plays, 1926–1939 by Dematagoda Udith (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 162 Dematagoda, Udith. Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic: A Study of His Novels and Plays, 1926–1939. Cultural History and Literary Imagination, 29. Peter Lang, Oxford, New York and Vienna, 2017. xii + 203 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €51.90: £42.00: $63.95 (paperback). Vladimir Nabokov and the Ideological Aesthetic is a slim volume packedwithstatementsthatresistmostconventionsofcontemporaryNabokov scholarship. Its author, Udith Dematagoda, whose research converges around such topics as ‘ideology and aesthetics in the context of twentieth-century modernist English and European literature, masculinity and fascism’, explores the evolution of Nabokov’s ideas on art, politics, totalitarianism and social responsibility in the two decades preceding World War Two, from the year when Mary was published to the completion of The Gift. Brisk and provocative, his analysis resists not only the writer’s own professed opposition to civic engagement in literature and to art’s political intent, but also what Dematagoda sees as modern Nabokovians’ fallibility — their upholding ‘the idea of Nabokov being a novelist of serious moral fiction’ (p. 116). The outcome of this study, which includes a sweeping chapter on drama (The Man from the USSR and The Waltz Invention) and three more detailed chapterlong explorations of The Eye, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift, is a position that considers Nabokov’s ‘uncompromising insistence on individualism […] antithetical to the egalitarian tenets of liberalism which Nabokov supposedly adhered to’ (p. 186). Dematagoda is not alone in his insistence on Nabokov’s adherence to an ideological viewpoint ripe with artistic and political consequences — Dana Dragunoiu, Galya Diment, Maxim Shrayer, Julian W. Connolly, and others, have convincingly established this commitment. The originality of his work lies in his showing that Nabokov’s aesthetics was the foundation and dialectical refraction of his ideology as well as in demonstrating how the writer’s ideological views changed over time (p. 42). Dematagoda challenges the widespread understanding that Nabokov’s aesthetics was steeped in ideas of Symbolism; makes a valuable point about the writer’s dictatorial tendencies when suggesting, in his reflections on Nabokov the dramatist, that ‘his own aesthetic vision’ placed ‘emphasis on the tyrannical will of the individual artist’ (p. 53); and engages his readers in a stimulating exploration of Invitation to a Beheading as Nabokov’s response to the First Writer’s Congress, Gor´kii’s postulates about the civic value of Socialist Realism, and Chernyshevskii’s ideas as the basis for the Bolshevik discourse on literature and its social function (pp. 110–21). Many of Dematagoda’s insights into Nabokov’s prose and dramaturgy are insightful and merit the readers’ attention. That said, the conclusions REVIEWS 163 Dematagoda draws from his construal of other Nabokov works, especially the plays, The Eye and Despair, appear unsubstantiated and driven by the critic’s own theoretical agenda. For example, Dematagoda’s claim that The Waltz Invention is ‘a sublimation of Nabokov’s own megalomaniac fantasy’ (pp. 45, 46) is corroborated by little more than an insistence that Nabokovian ‘instances of denial’ (in this case, of the play’s ‘topical import’) ‘are never so strident than when there is something important to conceal’ (p. 46). In a similar vein, Dematagoda’s analysis of Hermann Karlovich’s leftist sympathies as ‘caricatures’ that reveal ‘a very naïve understanding of Marxism on Nabokov’s part’ (p. 82) is grounded in a confused perception of Nabokov’s rejection of Marxism as an ontology, rather than a system of ideas that gave rise to Bolshevism, with its disregard for human rights, the uniqueness of every individual and freedom of artistic self-expression. (Nabokov, Dematagoda says, ‘seeks to mock Marxism for what he views to be its reductive and absurd interpretation of the material world’, p. 85.) This confusion may be grounded in Dematagoda’s most challenging, but also not fully proven, proposition that Nabokov’s rejection of Symbolism in the 1920s–30s was ‘perhaps also due to the similarities he perceived between Symbolist epistemology and other, putatively more rational, epistemological systems such as Freudian psychoanalysis, or even Marxism’ (p. 74). The main controversy of this work lies in Dematagoda’s seeing other researchers’ interpretations of Nabokov the writer and thinker as ‘overly generous’ and...