Puskin, Vermeer, PrivacyThis is a piece of graffiti in Russia depicting the famed duel, probably the only true duel, between Eugene Onegin the yawning dandy and Lensky the minor poet. Is it not a magnificent piece of art? Spraypainted directly onto the bricked face of a building, Onegin tosses his hat just before firing his shot, and the moon centered just above his head glows like a halo. Three birds take flight from the bare little fingerlike branches and the trees receding in the distance stand at attention like a mouthless, armless audience.
Nabokov started writing his translation of the monumental work in the early 1940's, though he was born with the story in his blood and it was as much apart of his environment as a child as our own Huck Finn is to us so, like any good boy throttling along the path of maturity, he could recite large passages from the masterpiece from a very early age. Though he might not have understood the adult motivations behind Onegin's advances on Olga, or the metaphysical implications of the fiction/reality motif that runs rampant throughout, these bits and pieces attached themselves to him, clung to his person, and became enfolded into the depths of his being: decades later when he picks up his own pen to start writing his own stories the little speckles of Onegin shimmer from beneath the gauzy surface and it is miraculous to see the puzzle pieces come together to form a semi-complete picture of an author and what made him so.
The work, though, might have been a bit too close to his heart, too near and too dear to him. In his discursive writings, and in interviews, he is right to point out his immediate aversion to incorporating any actual events into his works and cites the way in which the real life event wilts in the fictional light of the story. Plucking a flower from its native soil and transplanting it into some synthetic, manmade pot and dirt under unnatural lights - it can't breathe, it dies slowly and sadly and transforms into a shriveled heap of dryness. It cannot live in the world of fiction because it is firmly tethered to one life, a single person, one hand holding the string - whereas the invented event is not held by any one person or hand and is free to be held by all who read it. We all have events like this in our lives, so powerful only to us and so private that they are rendered illegible when others attempt to read them (if others even care to attempt to read them!) What happened when the writer tried to tackle his most beloved subject?
Last night I watched the episode of Sister Wendy where she goes to The Met in New York. Her shows always fill me with such an abundance of wonder, awe, and inspiration that I am always thoroughly exhausted just halfway through them and often need to pause for a break to catch my breath, and her special about The Met was no different. The very last paintings she comes upon are the mighty works of Vermeer - precious cargo, only about 25 in existence and 5 of those are held at the mammoth of Manhattan. The first 4 on the wall are all of his best work: Light through a window falling on a lady (not a fancy lady, but a real life lady). Quiet, stillness, and light. The fifth painting, The Allegory of Faith, is entirely different from every other work of his and is often criticized, Sister Wendy explains, because it is such a radical departure and so crammed with things. None of the quiet repose, none of the calm emptiness covered in soft light; instead the subject is far heavier: religion. Yes, the woman is overwrought with the heaviness of faith, clutches at her breast and with her foot she stomps down onto the world in a motion to crush the perfect-sphere of reality with the divine power of faith. The personal history of the artist, of course, colors the painting with an even thicker set of paints: Vermeer was born a Protestant, devout in some regards, but later converted to Catholicism in order to marry. The artist moved with his wife into her mother's home, just steps from a prominent Jesuit church, where they produced a multitude of children and died. When approached by a Protestant church in 1671 to paint for them an allegory about Faith, it is easy to see why he'd break from his usual paintings to attempt such a personal one - in a way, he painted it to recapture the faith he had to throw away and while this motivation is entirely self centered, it did not hinder his technique and what he painted is still just as beautiful (technically speaking) as any of his others, it just doesn't happen to fall in line with what the critics demanded/expected of him. In a way, by painting the Allegory, he was revealing the more authentic self and in doing so ran the risk of being polarizing (a painting of a pretty lady can always be appreciated, but a religious painting will only garner praise from the followers and hisses from the rest.)
When, in around the 1940s Nabokov set off on the task of writing his translation of Eugene Onegin he set himself rigid guidelines: it must be literal, it must carry over the rhyme, it must have a bustling appendix and index that overshadows the actual poem by several hundred pages (the two volume softbound edition that is on my shelf has about 200 pages devoted to the translated text of the poem, and over 600 pages of notes and the index in its own separate volume.) He only worked on it off and on, in between writing stories and novels and teaching college courses as well as his lepidopteral work at the Harvard Zoological Museum, and only published it 24 years later in 1964. It was panned, it was polarizing, so much so that it actually cost him a friendship! Read this, an article by his former friend, Edmund Bunny Wilson: NY Review of Books. Unaffected, of course, he fired several scorching letters of his own off to the papers and magazines. "Unlike my novels, Eugene Onegin possesses an ethical side, moral and human elements. It reflects the compiler's honesty or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a bad scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary." He's not modest enough to leave out the fact that he, Nabokov, was born in Russia and born into Onegin, and again i think of Stravinski's "You are not at home here, my dear fellow." Wilson, a proud American, speaking on the subject of Nabokov's Onegin is about as appropriate as a butcher delivering a speech at a symposium for heart surgeons just because he is handy with a knife.
This, I think, is the very problem with the personal: No one can comment on it without trespassing.
The personal and the public, the hidden and the shared. Nabokov dedicated more time to his Onegin translation than he gave to any one of his novels, or any two of his novels combined. He gave more of himself too, for we have not only his faithful translation but also his endless collection of notes, many of which are invaluable to scholars dealing with that lofty work (he haunted and hunted the libraries so completely that he collected each and every news article written in or around Russia during Pushkin's life and during the imagined life of Onegin - all of these sources are lost to history and his notes are the only remaining evidence left for us to browse.) In a way, he gave us not only that epic poem but also the world in which that poem lived and breathed; reading his appendix is like reading an encyclopedia that not only covers the events but gives context and feeling to them by way of his delicate word choice and his loving care for the subject. A world constructed of facts, though, will always be at the mercy of those that inhabit that world (nasty critics, those that speak on the topic without having embodied it, readers like me who admire it despite not being able to fully grasp it completely, those that care less, those that care too much) compared with a world constructed out of fiction - a castle that can't be touched.
In college I took a writing workshop called "Uses of Personal Experience in Fiction" and thought it was really interesting. At the age of 20, there seems to be a sea of experiences that all say "write me!" and the ones that shout the loudest are usually the most personal, the most private, and thus the most useless to readers. I think about all those stupid transplants I made while enrolled in that class: they withered! they shriveled! some sprouted heartily only to collapse under the weight of their own petals! This subject (of the personal jammed into the fictional) is all the more enticing: I recently discovered a cache of floppy disks labelled "Stories School", "Stories Mine", "Poems", "Letters Happy", "Letters Sad", "Notes", "Ephemera", and lastly "Essays." In total, they span about 10 years, the juiciest of years, the worst and best and most important of years, and ramble on through several thousand single spaced pages and while my first impulse was "burn! forget!" I wonder if they can't maybe be replanted in this soil here? Now and then, maybe, I might pluck one and see if it can cross the border into fiction and, like a beam of pure white light passing through the refracting facet of a prism - turn into a dazzling combination of all colors all at once. Or, just hold onto them as my own and hide them from myself again in the hopes that they might blossom in that fertile darkness known as privacy.
