What Is the Real Russia? Looking for Answers in Tolstoy and Nabokov | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑰

"This Russian aristocratic girl, the product of a European education, could feel the inner world of every native Russian — every country person."

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been swayed by large questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the voices of intellectuals have gone missing, or been drowned in noise, which only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to show itself. In any era, clear thinking is scarce, and people with insight are our best guarantee of seeing the road ahead.

So in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" we want to introduce as wide a range as we can of books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, our editors have read every book that came within our view, and they introduce each one to readers in good faith.

We also had help from contributing writers, who catch new currents first and see further than we do. Our thanks to them.

This is the thirteenth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it is about Russian culture. The author, Yun Yetui, is a writer, translator and book critic. He wrote A Land of Freedom and Love 《自由与爱之地》, and he translated Camus and Sartre*,* The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century*, and* Beginnings 《开端》, among other books.

This survey starts with Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, and Natasha's Dance itself has to start with a character in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace — Natasha. Honestly, there is no better or easier way in.

Who is Natasha? A character in War and Peace. Tolstoy invested her with his vision of a Russian "new woman." In the 19th century, on the question of which way Russia should go, Russians were locked in fierce opposition between Europeanization and native tradition. Natasha, an aristocrat, was given a purely European education, yet when she met a native rhythm she could fall right into step with it — hence the scene known as "Natasha's dance." On one visit with her family to her uncle's country estate, she was gnawing on rye cake and drinking vodka when balalaika country music struck up. Her uncle grew excited, picked up his guitar and began playing and singing to himself. Natasha had never heard anything like it, and still an instant sense of familiarity rose in her, and she leapt up to dance.

What comes next is a description of the dance itself, which is harder to get down than a smell or a taste — botch it and you have wasted a great deal of prose. Tolstoy tries everything he can think of. First he uses a question to mark how unusual the scene is: "Where, how, when had this countess, educated by a French émigré governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit, and acquired that manner which the pas de châle should, one would have thought, have effaced long ago?" Then two lines of indirect description: "In that first moment Nikolai and everyone else present felt afraid she might not carry it off — and then, all at once, that anxiety vanished, and they simply admired her." Then a detail: Natasha takes from someone's hand the one thing a country dance requires, a handkerchief. Finally Tolstoy sums it up: this Russian aristocratic girl, the product of a European education, could feel the inner world of every native Russian — every country person.

The "New Woman" in a "Tale of Two Cities"

Orlando Figes, the author of Natasha's Dance, is a scholar of Russian culture and a writer with more material than new ideas, and in the book he dutifully quotes Tolstoy's original. Natasha's cast of mind, he says — the way she saw things, her values — was shaped entirely by her European education, and set her far apart from the vast peasantry that formed the foundation of society, people the Renaissance and the Reformation never reached, still living in a "monotonous world of piety." And yet some instinct in Natasha's cultural makeup could answer, naturally, the "rhythm" of Russian folk tradition.

A fascination with foreign culture and a search for the new make life feel meaningful, while inherited customs and habits make people comfortable. Whenever they can, Russians want both — they have had to live inside this "dual personality." But this was a fact that surfaced only in Tolstoy's time: Russians born into a European education, who grew up naturally into Europeans, would sooner or later feel estranged from ancient Russia, and be made anxious by it. So they tried again to define themselves as "Russian" — but they had to do it through history, through art forms like literature, music, dance and song, through their Europeanized eyes and taste, remaking their relation to their own soil and remaking their country.

This is exactly what a cultural historian is good at, but first he has to explain where the dual personality came from. Russia does straddle Europe and Asia, true enough; still, without a tsar like Peter the Great, who made a forceful gesture toward Europe by building a whole new city and thereby set the course of the entire country, the "dual personality" would never have sprung out of nowhere in the Russian mind.

Natasha's Dance describes the founding of St. Petersburg in some detail: on a foggy morning in the spring of 1703, Peter the Great, with a dozen or so cavalrymen, crossed a bleak, barren stretch of marsh to the place where the Neva flows into the Baltic. Peter dismounted, drew a cross in the marsh with the tip of his sword, and announced, "This place is good." His aim had been to build a fortress for the war against the rising Swedes, but what he built was a city. St. Petersburg and Moscow, the old capital before it, were two different styles altogether: Moscow seemed to have grown out of the forest on its own, its people naturally "rustic," belonging to Asia, while St. Petersburg flatly defied the natural order. Peter wanted its posture of looking out toward Europe to raise the nation's standing and pride in a hurry — "a huge, utopian cultural project to remake the Russians as Europeans."

The ancient Chinese said that one gives rise to two, two gives rise to three, and three gives rise to the ten thousand things — but Russia has two cities and no third, so it stalls on the road to the ten thousand things. In daily life, whenever people talk about one of the two cities they have no choice but to bring up the other. The opposition between them was Peter's deliberate work: he cast "Moscow's Russia" as dark and backward and "St. Petersburg's Russia" as the stepping stone by which Russians would enter the progressive, enlightened world of the modern West. Every raw material for the city was imported: the granite for the embankments came from Finland and Karelia; the marble for the palaces from Italy, the Urals and the Middle East; gabbro and porphyry were shipped in from Sweden; basalt and slate came from Lake Onega; sandstone from Poland and Germany; tiles from the Low Countries. The list is easy to reel off, but the labor it actually took bears comparison with the pyramids or the Great Wall. It calls to mind the Soviet film of War and Peace, when the government of the day could send in the army to shoot its great battle scenes — no longer possible now.

And yet it was St. Petersburg's arrival that made the roots of traditional Russia show themselves as roots. Under the tsar's exquisite, grandiose dream, Russians faced a new question: was Russia still their home, and how could they avoid throwing away what was theirs in the course of Europeanization? The small group at the top of the social pyramid moved into the Europeanizing lane first; European architects built them European houses, described as bright oases in a desert made up of vast peasant society. And still, inside those houses there was always some part — the bedroom, say, or the boudoir, or the servants' rooms — done up in some informal "Russian style." Moscow, on the plain, was constant, quiet and reassuringly grand, made new again each year with the forest's own dying back and growing up, while St. Petersburg, a port, sat on unstable ground, was scoured by wind and rain, and set people imagining the end of the world — the sinister, decaying apartment house Dostoevsky describes in Crime and Punishment exists only in St. Petersburg; you would not find its like in Moscow. The two cities were two proposals that contradicted each other. In public life people could not be brought into agreement, but in private space they could arrive at some measure of synthesis. The basic question never went away: what is Russia? What kind of Russia do I want? The tsar's empire, set single-mindedly toward Europe — or the self-contained world of the "uncle" of the Natashas, living in his muddy village?

"All great Russians were Europeans; the two identities were interwoven with and dependent on each other in all sorts of ways." There is nothing original in Figes's argument, and the "tale of two cities" frame leaves very little room for new arguments or new angles of interpretation. Still, his writing has force and life. He does a genuinely good job of using the private lives of generations of Russian writers and artists to explain his theme. Westerners like Rilke, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, he argues, created a myth that treated Russia as exotic and other; they gave a rigid account of the "Russian soul" and equated it with a set of markers of "Russianness" to be shown to Western audiences — while missing the unity of opposites between East and West, Asia and Europe, contained in the scene of Natasha dancing, which is itself a kind of "universal Russian feeling."

The Blurred Roots of Old Russia: The Émigré "Notables" Who Barely Registered

So when does this unity of opposites tip toward unity rather than opposition? When Russians leave Russia. At that point Moscow becomes the homeland for them, and so does St. Petersburg. The October Revolution of 1917 ended tsarist rule and at the same time opened an era of Russian émigré culture. Here we turn from Natasha's Dance to other books, such as Teffi's memoir My Chronicle 《我的编年史》.

Teffi is a rather mysterious figure in Russian letters. Her birth date is unknown — perhaps 1876, perhaps 1885. She was from St. Petersburg and came of a noble family, yet she seems to have taken no interest in where the Russian nation was headed under its two cities. Her memoir was first published in Paris, the center of Russian émigré culture, in 1932, by which time she had long been a person of real standing in émigré circles. But from the memoir we cannot make out her own experiences, and we learn nothing of her family or children. Her fame was already large before 1917 — hundreds of her poems, short stories, novellas and essays had appeared, her plays had been staged in Russia's famous theaters, and the last tsar, Nicholas II, asked by name to read her books. Her interest, though, always lay in one individual after another, people almost cut loose from the grand backdrop of history and their era, living instead for strings of vivid, trivial talk with one another.

Figes has nothing to say about Teffi. The typical mark of émigré literature is homesickness: unwilling to accept a Russia ruled by the Bolsheviks, émigré writers were always glad to stop inside some past moment — childhood, say. Not Teffi. She represents no group; she cannot even be said to represent the émigrés. Her memoir holds none of the heavy material — leaving the homeland, longing for it, partings for life or death — just as it holds no detail of private life at all. The people she writes about, famous or not, all live inside a small circle of émigré letters, and what they say has nothing to do with history, the era or politics, as though they never gave any of it a thought.

Teffi plainly believed that every person is a separate individual; she never invoked the name of the nation, or fellow feeling, or the notion that we are all castaways together, to call for kindness from one individual to another. Writing about the well-known émigré poet Zinaida Gippius, Teffi took up how other émigrés judged her. Those people were far too vicious, she said — why take pleasure in viciousness? A writer named Alexei Remizov once called Gippius "nothing but bones and springs, a complicated construction — but by no means to be called human; with a biting savagery it negates all life." Teffi defended her: "Gippius's complicated construction is far more complicated than 'bones and springs.'" A judgment like that was cruel and unjust to her; in judging others, people must remember that "being a human being is not easy at all."

But in what way was Gippius's life not easy? What did she suffer? Teffi never says. She is always careful not to let an individual become the carrier of some collective trait, the concrete projection of some shared state of mind. This is probably also why she keeps so quiet about private life. Of Gippius's husband, the well-known writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Teffi says he never talked with anyone — "conversation simply didn't work for him." Of the poet Konstantin Balmont, she says that in emigration he lived in a small house, broke a windowpane, and left the room cold and dim; he would not put in new glass, since it would only break again. Teffi's portraits of these people all stay with you, but how far they can stand for the living conditions of the émigrés as a group is another matter.

Teffi's feeling for Russia is buried in the individual people she knew and the smallest of small anecdotes she lived through; you have to read all of My Chronicle as her salute to her own roots.

Though she was a notable among the émigrés, she made little impression — much as someone today who never posts selfies draws few followers — because Teffi, who never talked about herself, was also unlikely to become the main subject of anyone else's memories and portraits. Figes's book cannot quote a word of hers. She serves only to bring in other people, such as the well-known writer Ivan Bunin. In March 1920 the 50-year-old Bunin left his country with his wife and came to Paris, and the first person he met there was Teffi. Bunin once said the short stories Teffi published in the weekly Satyricon were written "in a healthy, plain way, very witty, with a sharp eye, superb mockery."

Roots in the Soil: Two Generations of Writers and Their Love of the Countryside

Unlike the carefree Teffi, Bunin, born in the Russian countryside, left in his work tireless, wistful descriptions of country scenes; naturally we are curious what scar a homeland he could never return to would leave on a man like that. A master of the short and medium-length story, Bunin published his one novel, the autobiographical The Life of Arseniev, around 1930; it went on to win him the Nobel Prize in Literature outright, though a good deal of its content had already appeared across several of his short stories. In the book the Russian countryside becomes an anchorage for his soul that cannot be cut away from him, its beauty bound up with its unpredictable wildness and the danger it holds.

The novel's hero describes his first long journey this way: his parents took him to a nature reserve (a notion that feels far too advanced for the late 19th century), where there was a small town; their carriage passed countless fields, valleys, paths and crossroads (a child's sense of time and distance is always wildly enlarged), and the one concrete scene he can actually remember is coming through a ravine and seeing a peasant with an axe at his belt pushing through the brush. Bunin writes that this was "one of the most mysterious and most terrifying peasants I have seen in my life" — and yet this peasant was also part of the fact of the hero's existence, taken in and even underlined for emphasis.

Bunin never in fact wrote an unqualified tribute to the countryside he loved with his whole heart. If we take Arseniev for Bunin himself, then his Russian childhood was a moment-by-moment mixture of happiness and grief, hope and disappointment, delight and fright. The young country squire goes to town and is beside himself with joy at the sight of a tin of black shoe polish (the round box it comes in, "made of ordinary bark — but what bark, that it could be turned by skilled hands into a box!"). Yet not long after leaving the city, open fields come back, and under the setting sun, in the "simple and free" countryside, stands an unusually large, unusually gloomy yellow house, ringed by a high stone wall, its gate shut, its windows barred; behind the iron bars of one window stands a man with a puffy face, sallow skin and a look of pain. It is an expression of "the deepest melancholy and sorrow, submission mixed with a feverish, hazy fantasy." This is a prisoner — a thief perhaps, or a murderer — but, like the man with the axe at his belt, he is both frightening and entrancing, a source of wonder.

Now a contrast: Herzen. Bunin was a country boy for whom going to town was a fresh experience; Herzen was the reverse, a Moscow city boy whose golden childhood memories were of summers at the Vasilyevskoye estate, more than 80 kilometers out in the country. His family had connections in the tsarist bureaucracy, and his father would always send word ahead to the local officials that they were coming to stay a few days and please make arrangements, so the village headman would requisition peasants' carts to fetch them.

This is recorded in his long memoir My Past and Thoughts: the city boy Herzen loved the look of the fields intensely. Passing through a village, he ran inside a landowner's deserted house, the floorboards squeaking under his feet, the furniture worn out, "living out its last years in exile" — and his heart filled with excitement. Of the Vasilyevskoye estate Herzen said that all his life he would "long for that old house of brick and stone, perhaps because it was there that I first saw the countryside."

He writes of a winding path that follows the river — "I would often spend the whole morning on that sandbank among the reeds" — and of a hunchbacked old gardener who sat in front of the house all day distilling mint water and boiling wild berries, secretly feeding the children all sorts of vegetables. He writes of crows rising into the air in flocks at dusk, and of owls calling at night, now like a baby crying, now like booming laughter, making his heart pound every time, and still he loved to listen.

What Herzen loved most was watching the countryside at dusk. Long after his father had sold the village off, the memory stayed fresh, and he called it "a devout, tranquil, poetic hour, just as it always was." In 1848, out in the Italian countryside with his wife, a passing impulse brought that country dusk back to him. What he saw was "the sun setting solemnly, gloriously, into a sea of fire, at last dissolving into it… then suddenly deep blue replaced the thick crimson, and everything was wrapped in a hazy mist — in Italy dusk comes quickly." Then the scene in front of him mixed with his childhood memories: livestock heading home, sheep bleating, dogs barking, farm boys and girls coming out of their doors to meet their cattle and sheep, playing along the bank, "the dew beginning to spread over the fields like smoke; the wind wandering above the forest, rustling, as if the leaves themselves were boiling…"

In the end the country scene comes down to this much: cattle and sheep, shepherd boys, fields. But connoisseurs of Russian landscape painting greatly admire these passages of Herzen's; they quote pieces of them and call them the equal of Turgenev's loveliest elegies.

Herzen is a conspicuous figure in 19th-century Russia, the spiritual heir of the Decembrist movement of 1825. The Decembrists were the first to raise the call to overthrow the tsar; the progressive aristocrats who led the revolt turned away from Europeanization and from St. Petersburg, wanting to go back to Russian customs and the Russian way of life. In that period plain, simple country houses were held in high regard, while powdered wigs and heavy scents were both thrown over. Herzen also said that St. Petersburg was not a city at all but plainly a military fortress — which by no means shows that he stood with native tradition in the argument between East and West, Asia and Europe. He said it out of a plain feeling for ordinary people.

Herzen too was among the Russians qualified to hold themselves up against Europeans: as a child, the food and dress in his house leaned European, and the children had to study European languages. His mother was German, and My Past and Thoughts describes the several German tutors the household hired. But what makes the book harder to forget is everything thoroughly native in his home — his father's cold, stern patriarchal habits, for instance, and his own attachment to the household's nannies, servants, coachmen and hired hands. His memories of the people who cared for and waited on him in childhood are especially alive: a nanny told him about the great Moscow fire of 1812; a maid played cards with him and threw herself into the game, quite unlike the guests who amused him half-heartedly for a while. The nannies and servants had all been raised up from among the serfs; if the master of the house had any complaint about them they could be sent straight back where they came from, and those who made mistakes fared worse — they might be packed off into the army, where service in the tsarist forces then ran more than twenty years. The punished servant would be led away in tears by the police, while Herzen and the household's other lower orders could only hold back their own tears and watch in silence.

Figes says Herzen's childhood memories read like a pastoral idyll, one bound to be lost as childhood passed. Herzen longed to go back to it constantly, and the way he did so was by preaching revolution. He was Russia's earliest 19th-century socialist. He went to live abroad after 1847 — not because revolution drove him out but, on the contrary, in order to breathe revolution and draw Russia into the larger work of Europe's self-liberation. That was, in his eyes, Russia's path of "Europeanization" — not Europeanization in culture, way of life and taste (Isaiah Berlin thought My Past and Thoughts the literary equal of War and Peace, though it contains little that reflects Herzen's own taste), but political Europeanization: constitutional government, democracy, equality among people. His own family was ruled by his father, yet Herzen felt that the men and women who served around him could sense the fine blessings equality would bring.

Into his memories of the Vasilyevskoye estate Herzen folded this thought: "It never once occurred to me then how serious a thing it was to make peasants lose four or five days in the busy season." Among those who came out to greet the party at the estate were the village headman, a priest, a church deacon, servants and a few peasants, all standing respectfully — all but the simpleton Pronka, who "kept his human dignity, never took off his greasy cap, and stood off at a distance grinning foolishly." From the welcoming line itself you can see that in the countryside, however low into the dust these common people had been ground, they still had real chances to get near the master; the distance between the two did not seem so great.

The regret of Herzen's whole life was that he lacked the strength to unite enough people to push the social revolution he cared for forward even one small step. But his thinking went past the split between Europeanization and native tradition. In Natasha's Dance Figes says he knew only how to destroy and could put forward nothing constructive, which is true enough; what makes Herzen valuable, though, is his awareness of his own limits. Apart from a particular figure like Lenin, surely no reader draws revolutionary resolve from My Past and Thoughts and resolves to take up the march where fallen martyrs left off; we can only admire the great capacity for self-examination Herzen kept up over the whole course his mind traveled.

Nostalgia: The Émigré Writers' Literary "Dividend"

1870, the year Herzen died, happens also to be the year Bunin was born. Bunin had none of the revolutionary feeling Herzen inherited from the Decembrists; on the contrary, his inner map was tinted with the light of the Russian empire's setting sun. But the work of these two Russian cultural émigrés, one after the other, memoir or novel, can both be read as books of the self. In The Life of Arseniev, as in My Past and Thoughts, the changing mind of the "I" at the center, and the character it reveals, stay at the front of the stage as the unchanging theme.

Bunin had made his name by the early 1900s. After going into exile in Europe in 1920 he went on publishing in journals such as Contemporary Annals, put out in Paris. By then Bunin stood as the legitimate heir of Tolstoy and Turgenev, and carried something of the widely loved Chekhov's manner as well. In a famous speech in 1924 Bunin said the "mission of the émigré" was to keep this inheritance out of the hands of the degenerate leftist modernists and Soviet art, and to do his part for the "true Russia." Whether that Russia was Europeanized or native made no difference at all; to borrow Thomas Mann's famous line, where I am, there is Russia.

Figes writes of Bunin: he "became a representative figure of the Russian nation only after 1917. Before the revolution many people did not consider him a first-rate writer: next to the more popular avant-garde writers, his prose style looked heavy and conventional. But after 1917 a revolution took place in émigré artistic values. They began to reject the avant-garde literature they associated with the revolutionaries, and once abroad they found enormous comfort in Bunin's old-fashioned 'fine Russian prose.'"

In other words, after 1917 romantic nostalgia replaced a critical spirit that faced reality head on, and became what the great army of émigrés, and readers unwilling to cut their own Russian roots, demanded of literature. The generator of traditional taste moved abroad with Bunin, Gippius and the rest. Figes argues that Bunin's early stories criticized the rot and decadence of the provinces, but that after 1917 he instead conjured up a romanticized picture of the old Russian countryside: "a sunlit land of primeval forest and boundless steppe, where peasants labored hard and happily, living in harmony with nature and with the aristocratic companions who farmed alongside them." It seems he had no choice: cut off from his native soil, he had to manufacture one, and it was bound to be gentle and rose-colored — otherwise what use would it have been to him?

And yet by the time he wrote The Life of Arseniev, Bunin had in effect returned to his earlier self. In this book the charm of the countryside and of the traditional Russian way of life is always produced by contrast: Arseniev has to leave the countryside before he can appreciate it, just as he has to live through the bitter cold of autumn, winter and spring before he can throw his arms around the brief three months of summer and remember every outing and every single thing he saw. In fact what readers of this book find hardest to forget must be the way the closed, conservative mind of the countryside knocks the hero to the ground again and again and makes him swallow a bellyful of tears; with its comfort, its completeness, its calm, it always binds down the wings of a young man who wants to fly out. Whenever Arseniev, out on his own, runs into a setback, he grows homesick, and the flaws in his character can be traced entirely to a shut-in, monotonous country childhood.

One of the most memorable episodes in the novel is when the hero falls in love with a plump neighboring maid; but the moment word gets out, the family flies into a rage and fires the maid with maximum efficiency, putting out the son's desire. Had Herzen read this he could have made a great deal of it, since one of the sharpest and most systematic lines of thought in My Past and Thoughts is on the deep ills of the servant system.

Still, as long as Bunin went on writing his Russian past, he belonged among the old guard. Contemporary Annals, an important journal, was conservative too, upholding 19th-century values, and Bunin's solid standing pressed down on the younger, more experimental émigré writers and poets and made it hard for them to get out from under.

Vladimir Nabokov was one of them. From here on the stage is his. Born in St. Petersburg, thirty years younger than Bunin, Nabokov exchanged a good deal of correspondence with him while both were in Paris. Bunin's temper ran to the caustic; he thought highly of himself and was generally hard to get on with, but he kept a broadly appreciative attitude toward this younger man. Nabokov's early short stories, for their part, deliberately took Bunin as their model — and like Bunin's own stories published between 1910 and 1920, they too carry Chekhov's deep imprint.

In The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov you can read a story Nabokov dedicated to Bunin: A Bad Day. It appeared in July 1931 in Latest News, Bunin's regular outlet. Nabokov's opinion of himself was high, and by then he already had a name in émigré letters, but this was still the first time he had dedicated a story to another writer. He meant his thanks to Bunin sincerely: A Bad Day is close to Bunin not only in style but in setting — the countryside. The hero, Peter Shishkov, a sickly, shy country boy, rides to a nearby estate for a child's name-day party. The countryside in the story, though it lies near St. Petersburg rather than near Moscow as in My Past and Thoughts, is not very different from the countryside of other Russian writers: narrow forest paths, thick grass, reeds lush along the banks of a stream, the clop of hooves, the sound of a peasant knocking on wood carrying a long way — except that, as a member of the younger generation of Russians (born in 1899), he takes in the telegraph poles newly put up in the country and the buzzing they make.

Peter is self-conscious and oversensitive; falling for a girl his own age amounts to building himself a wall he can never break through. This too echoes Bunin's famous First Love and Mitya's Love, and the hero of The Life of Arseniev is much the same — the young country squire dreams of love day and night, yet can never sort out his relations with one love interest after another; desire becomes a life test he can never pass, and his self takes shape, shamefacedly, through one setback in love after another.

It is fair to say Nabokov drew close to Bunin on purpose, to improve his chances of publication and his standing in émigré literary circles. When The Life of Arseniev first came out, Bunin inscribed a copy for Nabokov, then in Berlin, and Nabokov wrote back quickly to say he was reading it closely. Yet A Bad Day is truly slight next to Nabokov's later work. Set against the sharp psychological tension of novels like Despair, Laughter in the Dark and The Defense, or the fine splendor of Speak, Memory, his account of childhood, the artistic spirit in A Bad Day is elementary — Nabokov is stepping carefully in Bunin's footprints, not daring to overstep. Even in Speak, Memory, though, Nabokov takes his material from moments of "childhood summers at the family estate," moments worth returning to in dream over and over; broadly speaking they still fall inside the category of the Russian pastoral.

Of Bunin, Figes says, not without disapproval, that he came to the West with "a fixed readership and a writing style he could not break out of," turning out story after story and play after play on the happy lives of Russian country gentry and so prolonging "that reassuring tradition of the past." The state of affairs he helped create turned avant-garde poets like Marina Tsvetaeva into casualties — Tsvetaeva had made her name before 1917, but in the émigré world her avant-garde poetry drew no attention. Facing the same conditions, Nabokov nonetheless stood out and grew into a major figure of literary change. Something like A Bad Day counts for almost nothing in his whole body of work, yet it was while writing such quick-money small pieces that he finished his earliest novels — Mary (1926), The Defense (1930) and Glory (1932). Mary has a distinct Bunin flavor, writing nostalgia in a fresh, memorable style with very restrained feeling; the other two have almost nothing to do with Bunin at all.

Discovering Exile Itself: Nabokov's Breakthrough

Nabokov succeeded precisely because he stopped standing in Bunin's shadow, safely harvesting what looked like an inexhaustible "nostalgia dividend," and took hold of exile itself. Both Herzen and Bunin carried the feeling of leaving home and longing for it, but Nabokov went past them. In analyzing him, Figes brings out his concentrated, sharp attention to concrete things in memory; he says Nabokov's "memory" is a "creative act" (a true portrait of the artist's nature), and that "the past he revives is mixed with the present through association." Memory itself is thereby turned into a kind of personality, a kind of art. Both Mary and Glory contain exiles whose souls, as their bodies move further and further from Russia, dream their way step by step back to their native soil, drawing near muddy country roads or forbidding city houses. In Glory the hero, Martin Edelweiss, comes from Crimea; only when he has crossed the border, reached Berlin at last and will never return to Russia do the fantasies of his native soil grow clear in his mind.

Let us go back to Nabokov's short stories. These early works — Revenge, The Golden Rooster 《金鸡》, Perfection and others — all carry a faint air of menace, a sense of the uncanny. But death never comes too easily; sometimes it hangs about, neither there nor not there. Reading Perfection, for instance, we can never quite tell whether the boy has really drowned, or whether his psychologically deformed tutor is imagining that he is drowning. Bunin once praised Nabokov's devilish imagination, but never realized that Nabokov was in fact learning from him — Bunin himself often wrapped death, or near-death, in layer after layer of brocade, like a dagger, and let it fall only at a story's end. Nabokov must have studied deeply how Bunin used language to write a story that is uncanny at its core in tones so oblique and soft.

Only with Invitation to a Beheading can Nabokov really be said to have finished his apprenticeship — mastering Bunin's craft and taking spiritual leave of him at the same time. And yet even back in A Bad Day, that tribute of a story, there was already one episode that showed Nabokov's own hand. At the neighbors' house Peter meets an elderly French governess who has lived in Russia for half a century; she opens her mouth and out come a few sentences that mix French and Russian together:

"Priate-qui? Priate-qui? Toute n'est caroche." (Hide-and-seek? Hide-and-seek? This spot is no good.) Seeing Peter look embarrassed, she went on: "Sichasse pocajou caroche messt." (Quick, I'll take you to a good spot right now.)

This is what you get when Russian sentences are spelled out by French rules — neither French nor Russian. Bunin could never have pulled off a trick like this, though that does not mean Bunin never received a similarly multilingual upbringing: in The Life of Arseniev the hero's mother has an angry young man named Baskakov teach her son French, and the tutor also has him read Don Quixote in Russian translation. But Nabokov would go on to show, more and more fully, his ear for every kind of word game — puns, near-homonyms, languages crossing wires with one another — which turn up often in his middle and later stories, such as Mademoiselle O, Ultima Thule and Lance. He grew up in a genuinely international setting, a St. Petersburger Europeanized from birth, who mastered English before he was fluent in Russian. His becoming an émigré looks like an active choice made on the strength of his gift, rather than something forced on him.

Nabokov said quite plainly that the Russia before 1917 and the Russia after it were separated by more than two thousand years. Unless it rose to the level of a real artistic pursuit, an émigré's picture of the homeland was simply illusion. He set the standard himself: in him you no longer see any contest between Europeanization and native tradition, between St. Petersburg and Moscow, but only what happens to Russia as a whole, cast into exile, as it changes in answer to its new surroundings. Reading Natasha's Dance on the movements of Nabokov, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and the rest, along with its faint lament that they had no successors, you begin to feel the émigrés are like precious objects rescued from a museum as a country falls, taking it as their due to stand for the essence of Russia — and you may even sense a bias at work.

Natasha has gone into the distance; in a 20th-century setting this character, and the Tolstoyan ideal she carried, has suddenly stopped mattering. As Natasha's Dance moves toward its end, we watch Figes go on displaying his command of music, spending many pages on the episode in which Stravinsky, living in America, was invited back to visit the Soviet Union and meet Shostakovich, who had stayed. But he seems to have given hardly a thought to saying more about Solzhenitsyn — the key figure who at the end of the 20th century relit the whole argument over Russian Europeanization versus native tradition. Why is he not in the book?

Maybe the author had his reasons; maybe the translation we are reading has been cut; maybe his deadline was closing in. None of it matters — when it comes to what cannot be said, we have the ability to keep on not saying it, and the presence of mind to look away. Next to Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, with his art-first stance and his muted national feeling, looks so friendly, so harmless. There is another story in his collection called The Forgotten Poet, which mentions that "a good poem can send a shiver of current between one's shoulder blades" — a line that would appear again and again in his lectures on literature. For him, what the shoulder blades feel counts for far more than anything you could work out with your toes.

Cover image: a still from War and Peace (2016), via Douban.