Vladimir Nabokov
Translated by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy
Knopf ($26)
In a 1941 lecture entitled “The Tragedy of Tragedy,”
Vladimir Nabokov posed the idea to students at Stanford University that the theater
as we know it is severely hampered by nearly ineradicable conventions that
prevent any innovation that could lead to artistic transcendence: “The highest
achievements in poetry, prose, painting, showmanship are characterized by the
irrational and illogical, by that spirit of free will that snaps its rainbow
fingers in the face of smug causality. But where is the corresponding
development in drama?” He points to a few magical plays, notably Hamlet and
King Lear, which he calls “dream-tragedies” and which he declares are
the rare exceptions that can be named alongside “the numberless glories of
novels and short stories and verse produced during these last three or four
centuries.” Nabokov always opted for complete artistic freedom, which he found
and exploited to amazing effect in the modern novel, while his forays into the
theater achieved and encompassed significantly less. He also famously disliked
novels with a lot of dialogue, favoring in his own works to have the narrative
tunnel its way through outrageous labyrinths that no character could ever
actually say, and with drama being virtually all dialogue, it’s no
wonder that he found the theater encumbered by its own form.
Nabokov had two periods of
involvement with the Russian émigré theater, the first in the mid-1920s, when
he was still largely a poet and had not yet begun writing novels, and the
second in the late 1930s, soon before he abandoned Russian and began writing in
English. These were times of transition for Nabokov, and in each of the plays from
these periods the reader can sense a yearning for connection—to Russia, to his
fellow émigrés, to the audience, to the dramatic form itself—that’s much less
present in his other work. Only in his screenplay for the film version of Lolita
does he seem the supremely confident artist enjoying his complete
faculties, even though the script is much more of a literary creation than it
is a feasible dramatic work (which may be why director Stanley Kubrick
completely ignored it, simply using Nabokov’s name as the screenwriter to add
prestige to the film). Nabokov the playwright is always surprisingly
self-conscious and gimmicky, and this tentativeness may be why he only allowed
one of his plays to be translated into English during his lifetime: the 1938
political farce The Waltz Invention, which was translated in 1966 by
Nabokov’s son, Dmitri. Seven years after Nabokov’s death Dmitri translated a
collection of four plays entitled The Man from the USSR and Other Plays,
leaving only a few early plays untranslated, most notably the five-act verse
drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn, which only exists in incomplete form
in two slightly different copies. Leaving almost no Nabokov unpublished,
however, Knopf has finally edited and released this missing work in English,
lacunae and all.
Written in the winter of 1923/4,
when Nabokov was only twenty-four, The Tragedy of Mister Morn finds
Nabokov at his most mimetic. Channeling Shakespeare almost shamelessly, The
Tragedy of Mister Morn is a semi-fantastical political drama in which the
personal machinations of a few warped individuals play out on the stage of an
unnamed and idealized kingdom. Morn is a mysterious and benevolent monarch who
rules behind a mask and mixes with his subjects as an ordinary man, and Tremens
is a brutal revolutionary who yearns much more for destruction than for
positive change, and when Morn falls into a not very believable dispute with
Ganus, another would-be revolutionary, over his wife, Midia, the stage is set
for Tremens to strike. Written in a much stricter iambic pentameter than
Shakespeare ever employed (and translated into loose and readable five-stress
lines by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan), the play’s five acts work
around the clock to emulate their Shakespearean model. Each interaction is a
chance for Nabokov’s characters to mouth soul-stirring conceits, and even the
most walk-on characters have something profound to say about the human
condition. At the end of Act II, Scene I, a servant cleaning up after the other
characters ends his eleven-line mumblings with these thoughts on aging:
O,
how my bones ache, how they ache! Cook
shoved
some ointment at me,—says, try it,
rub
some on . . . Try arguing . . . That’s all I need . . .
Old
age isn’t some ugly mug daubed on
a
fence, you can’t just paint over it.
There are some lovely observations jammed into these characters’
speeches, but Nabokov often forces the profundity to the point of accidental
comedy. His stagy masques also amuse with their overt playness, and while his
Shakespearean referents (especially Othello) are very well woven into
the drama, he’s just way too overawed by his British master, which is all to be
expected in a young and inexperienced playwright trying to find his voice.
Prefiguring the
personal/political nightmares of his later novels Invitation to a Beheading,
Bend Sinister, and Pale Fire, The Tragedy of Mister Morn finds
Nabokov already transforming his lost Russia into a dreamscape overcome by
madness. While Morn’s benevolence may be a bit too facile and uncomplicated for
real tragedy, and with Tremens’s brutal nihilism strangely echoing the
dismissive way that Dostoyevsky portrays Raskolnikov’s revolutionary ideas in Crime
and Punishment (a comparison that Nabokov would doubtless reject outright),
The Tragedy of Mister Morn doesn’t serve as a very sophisticated
examination of power, but like the Lolita screenplay, it is a very good
piece of writing. Like Iago, Tremens has no motive for his atrocities other
than criminal mischief, and while this works less for Nabokov than it does for
Shakespeare, the density and lyricism of Nabokov’s verse work far better here
than it does in his lyric poetry. Nabokov needed a larger and more
forward-moving vehicle for his poetic ideas at the time, and because he
idolized Shakespeare so much, verse-drama was a natural progression for him.
Thankfully he soon moved on to the novel, which in his fifty-year career he
took to a nearly unmatched poetic level.
—David Wiley
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