The author talks about time, life, wanting to see himself in eternity. It says that the researcher at first does not see that time, limitless at first glance, is in fact a round fortress. The author remembers himself at the christening, when he first realized that these were his parents, remembers his games in the cave, the children's bed. He arranges his memories in time. Childhood in the St. Petersburg estate Vyre. The first decade of the century seemed extraordinary to him. Father's death.
As a child, the author learned that he had “color hearing,” like his mother, and could tell about the color of any letter, and the same letters of the Latin and Russian alphabet are different in color. Until the age of ten, Volodya had a very strong aptitude for mathematics. His mother told him about her childhood, how she loved puzzles, cards and mushroom hunting. Nabokov left St. Petersburg at eighteen. At that time he had not yet shown any interest in his ancestry. Now he strives to remember everyone he saw in childhood, his many relatives on his father and mother. Already abroad, his cousin told him that their family descended from the Russified Tatar prince Nabok. Grandmother, father's mother, was born Baroness Korf, and was related to the Aksakovs, Shishkovs, Pushchins, and Danzas.
Nabokov's coat of arms is a checkerboard with two bears. The mother's brother, Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov, made Volodya his heir, but the revolution immediately took away the inheritance. The father's brother, Konstantin Dmitrievich Nabokov, is mentioned in connection with the happy avoidance of death - for example, he did not board the Titanic. He died from a draft while lying in the hospital after a minor operation. For the American version of this book, the author makes a long digression for foreigners, saying that for him, homesickness is a longing for childhood, and not for lost tithes. Keeping the past inside is his hereditary trait; it was inherited from the Rukavishnikovs and Nabokovs. There was also a family penchant for everything English, so Volodya learned to read in English earlier than in Russian. A long series of bonnies and governesses, teachers, passes through his childhood.
Vladimir Nabokov writes that he has noticed a pattern more than once: as soon as you mention some incident from life in a work, it fades in memory. In the works - his houses, a governess from Lausanne. Nabokov's double in the past watches her arrival at the station and touches the snow, “scattering half a century of life between his fingers.” Nabokov also gives his children's furnishings in the room and colored pencils to his literary characters. A person, according to the writer, always feels at home in his past.
Nabokov recalls his first uncaught butterfly, which he caught forty years later in another country. He visited the old governess from Lausanne in 1921; she was friends in Switzerland with his mother’s former governess, with whom she did not speak at all in the Nabokovs’ house. Nabokov and his friend bought her hearing aid. Two years later the old woman died.
The author recalls his travels to Paris, the Riviera, and Biarritz on the magnificent Nord Express. He remembers the girl Colette, with whom he made a failed escape from Biarritz. As if in a magic lantern, a series of tutors and educators appears before him: a carpenter’s son, a Ukrainian, a Latvian, a Catholic Pole, a Lutheran Jewish origin. The latter just came up with the idea of introducing the children to the magic lantern that his friend had, and he began to stage terrible performances, muttering poetry to the pictures. In the end, Volodya begged his mother to pay this comrade, and he disappeared along with the lantern.
When Nabokov imagines this succession of teachers, he is struck by the stability and harmonious fullness of life. He notes the skill of the memory goddess Mnemosyne, who “connects the disparate parts of the main melody, collecting and tightening the lily of the valley stems of notes that hung here and there throughout the rough score of the past.” Nabokov watches everyone from the side as a ghost from the future.
At the age of eleven, Volodya entered the Tenishev School, where he was accused of not wanting to join the environment and flaunting English and in French words, in the reluctance to dry themselves with a common wet towel and eat bread grabbed by someone else’s hands. But what I didn’t like most about Volodya was that he was brought by a driver in livery and that he did not belong to any groups, unions or associations; on the contrary, he felt disgust for them. The attacks of the reactionary press on the cadets became constant, and my mother collected caricatures of my father. Because of one offensive article, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov challenged the editor of the newspaper “Novoye Vremya” to a duel. Volodya finds out about this by chance, on the day of the duel, at which reconciliation is achieved. This is associated in his memory with the way his father died - at night in 1922 he shielded Miliukov from a bullet and was mortally wounded in the back.
Myne Reed's books are associated for Nabokov with his cousin Yuri Raush, with whom they played scenes from the book. Yuri told Vladimir about his love for a married lady. Together they were sent to Berlin to straighten their teeth, together they played games, and soon Yuri died in an attack in the Crimean steppe.
The first love came, whose name Nabokov does not reveal, mentioning that its colors are the same as the colors of the name Tamara. He met her in the summer in Vy-ra, but in St. Petersburg, with the onset of winter, the romance began to fade in the urban setting (where they went to museums and cinemas). After Tamara told him that their love could not cope with this difficult times. But for Nabokov, this time also means a collection of poems for Tamara, published in 1916. The book was, in Nabokov’s opinion, bad, and the school director.V. Gippius and his cousin Zinaida Gippius believed that Volodya would never become a writer. This story gave the future writer immunity to one-time literary fame and indifference to reviews. The following summer in Vyra, Vladimir and Tamara swore to each other eternal love, and then they didn’t see each other for several months, Tamara entered the service. In the summer of 1917 they met on a country train, this meeting was the last.
Nabokov makes an aside, saying that the American edition of the book had to explain to surprised readers that the era of concentration camps began immediately after Lenin seized power. His father remained in St. Petersburg until the last opportunity and sent his family to Crimea. There Volodya received a letter from Tamara, from then on the loss of his homeland was tantamount to the loss of his beloved, until he expressed his longing in “Mashenka”. During the summer they corresponded, these letters gave a special flavor to homesickness. Sometimes Nabokov dreamed of traveling with a false passport to Vyru and Rozhdestveno, but he dreamed about it for too long and spent too much money. He doesn’t know what happened to Tamara afterwards. In the summer of 1919, the Nabokovs settled in London; a year later, the parents and their three youngest children moved to Berlin, and Volodya and Seryozha entered Cambridge. At the moment of meeting his mentor, Volodya clumsily pushed him over a tea set that was standing on the floor. Many years later, Nabokov visited this man and asked if his mentor remembered him. Hearing a negative answer, Vladimir again stepped on the tray next to the chair and thereby made him remember himself.
In Cambridge, Vladimir had to live by following ridiculous rules: walking on the grass is a fine, and you can’t heat in the bedroom. True story his stay at the university, as Nabokov admits, is the story of his attempts to hold on to Russia. He argued a lot about politics, about Lenin's terror, which the British blindly did not recognize. Then Nabokov turned to literature: the fear of forgetting what he acquired in Russia drove him on. In England, he continued to play football in his favorite role as a goalkeeper. Cambridge became a frame for memories of Russia, Vladimir restored his homeland in his soul and secured it forever.
Nabokov speaks of the spiral as the spiritualization of the circle and, in connection with this, of the Hegelian triad. The spiral consists of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For Nabokov, these are three periods of his life - the twenty-year Russian period, the time of emigration and life in his new homeland. The writer has already said everything that can be said about emigration in his books. He gave lessons in English and French, tennis, translated Alice in Wonderland, came up with a cross word and composed chess problems. There were an extremely large number of Russian writers around, but Nabokov only talks about a strange lyrical walk with Tsvetaeva in 1923, a meeting with Bunin, with whom he was never able to talk about art, casually mentions Remizov, Kuprin, Aldanov, Aikhenvald, Khodasevich and repents, that he did not notice the merits of Poplavsky’s poetry, seeing its shortcomings.
In 1940, he managed to obtain an exit visa to America, and Nabokov, already with his wife and little son, left. He returns to the day when his son was born, remembers his infancy, all his strollers, which were later replaced by cars, clothes, walks, squares where they sat. Photograph of his son by the sea - Nabokov is sure that there is a piece of majolica on it, continuing the pattern of the piece that he himself found in 1903, and found by his mother in 1885, and his grandmother, even earlier. If all the pieces could be collected, what would form is a cup, broken no one knows when, “but now repaired with the help of these bronze clips.” In May 1940, he was again by the sea, with his wife and six-year-old son, this is the last walk in the park before leaving for America. This square remained colorless in my memory, only the steamer pipes, because of the houses and drying clothes, were remembered as a picture-riddle, “where everything is deliberately confused, once seen can never be returned to chaos.”
Nostalgic theme in the novel
Nabokov's Russia is not like the Russia of Bunin, Kuprin, Shmelev, Zaitsev. There are no Russian types in it, it is an image of lost childhood. This is “a sign, a call, a question thrown into the sky and suddenly receiving a semi-precious, delightful answer” - this metaphor from the novel “Mashenka” passed through the entire work of the writer until the autobiography “Other Shores”. Emigration for Nabokov is a consequence of the revolution. “Other shores” are the shores of an already unattainable, lost Russia and at the same time the shores of forced emigration. Russia is an image of a lost paradise.
According to Andrei Ariev, the first phrase of the novel - “The cradle rocks over the abyss” - denotes the creation of a heavenly place, the writer’s work as a return to his St. Petersburg childhood, the cradle sacred to Nabokov. The world that a child recognizes, according to Ariev, in Nabokov’s work has grown to become a metaphor for all creativity.
Another researcher, Ilya Kalinin, suggests that the purpose of a book of memoirs for a writer is to find behind the external biographical outline a secret code that reveals the meaning of his own destiny. For Nabokov, Russian history exists not in chronology, but in his memories. And remembering for him is seeing, not telling a story. “Other Shores” combines the subject and its reflection: these are simultaneously the shores of maturity and emigration, and the shores of childhood and homeland, rediscovered through creativity.
Almost all of Nabokov’s works contain biographical memoirs; entire periods of the author’s life are described in Mashenka, Feat, and The Gift. But “Other Shores” is not a memoir for posterity, but a riddle, a message from childhood that Nabokov is trying to unravel.
Vladimir Nabokov
Other shores
Preface to the Russian edition
The autobiography offered to the reader covers a period of almost forty years - from the first years of the century to May 1940, when the author moved from Europe to the United States. Its purpose is to describe the past with extreme precision and find in it meaningful outlines, namely: the development and repetition of secret themes in manifest destiny. I tried to give Mnemosyne not only freedom, but also law.
The basis and partly the original of this book was its American edition, Conclusive Evidence. Having a perfect command of both English and French from infancy, I would switch from Russian to foreign language without difficulty, if I were, say, Joseph Conrad, who, before he began to write in English, did not leave any trace in his native (Polish) literature, but on favorite language(English) skillfully used ready-made formulas. When, in 1940, I decided to switch to English language, my trouble was that before that, for more than fifteen years, I wrote in Russian and over these years I left my own imprint on my instrument, on my intermediary. By switching to another language, I was thus not abandoning the language of Avvakum, Pushkin, Tolstoy - or Ivanov, Nanny, Russian journalism - in a word, not from common language, but from an individual, blood dialect. The long-term habit of expressing myself in my own way did not allow me to be content with stencils in my newly chosen language - both the monstrous difficulties of the upcoming transformation, and the horror of parting with a living, tame creature, first plunged me into a state about which there is no need to dwell; I will only say that not a single one standing on a certain level the writer had not experienced it before me.
I see unbearable shortcomings in such mine English essays, such as "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight"; there is something satisfying to me in "Bend Sinister" and some of the individual stories that appeared from time to time in The New Yorker magazine. The book “Conclusive Evidence” was written for a long time (1946–1950), with especially painful difficulty, because the memory was tuned to one mode - musically unspoken Russian - and another mode was imposed on it, English and detailed. In the resulting book, some of the small parts of the mechanism were of dubious strength, but it seemed to me that the whole worked quite well - until I took on the crazy task of translating Conclusive Evidence into my old, main language. Such shortcomings appeared, so disgusting was another phrase, there were so many gaps and unnecessary explanations that accurate translation into Russian would be a caricature of Mnemosyne. Keeping the general pattern, I changed and added a lot. The proposed Russian book refers to English text, How capital letters to italics, or how a staring face relates to a stylized profile: “Let me introduce myself,” said my fellow traveler without a smile, “my last name is N.” We started talking. The road night flew by unnoticed. “So, sir,” he finished with a sigh. Outside the window of the carriage, a stormy day was already smoking, sad copses flashed by, the sky was white over some suburb, here and there windows in distant houses were still burning, or had already been lit...
Here is the sound of a guiding note.
Other shores
Dedicated to my wife
Chapter first
The cradle rocks over the abyss. Drowning out the whispers of inspired superstitions, common sense tells us that life is just a crack of weak light between two perfectly black eternities. There is no difference in their blackness, but we tend to look into the pre-life abyss with less confusion than into the one towards which we fly at a speed of four thousand five hundred heartbeats per hour. I knew, however, a sensitive young man who suffered from chronophobia and in relation to the limitless past. With languor, downright panic, watching a home-made film shot a month before his birth, he saw a completely familiar world, the same situation, the same people, but he was aware that he was not in this world at all, that no one was aware of his absence notices and does not grieve for him. Particularly haunting and scary was the sight of a newly purchased baby carriage, standing on the porch with the smug inertness of a coffin; the carriage was empty, as if “when time converted into the imaginary value of the past,” as my young reader aptly put it, his very bones had disappeared.
Vladimir Nabokov
Other shores
PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION
The autobiography offered to the reader covers a period of almost forty from the first years years of the century to May 1940, when the author moved from Europe to the United States. Its goal is to describe the past with extreme accuracy and find meaningful outlines in it, namely: the development and repetition of secret themes in manifest destiny. I tried to give Mnemosyne not only freedom, but also law.
The basis and partly the original of this book was its American edition, Conclusive Evidence. Having a perfect command of both English and French from infancy, I would have switched from Russian to a foreign language for the needs of writing without difficulty, if I were, say, Joseph Conrad, who, before he began to write in English, had no trace in his native (Polish) language. He did not abandon literature, but skillfully used ready-made formulas in his chosen language (English). When, in 1940, I decided to switch to English, my trouble was that before that, for more than fifteen years, I wrote in Russian and during these years I left my own imprint on my instrument, on my intermediary. By switching to another language, I thus abandoned not the language of Avvakum, Pushkin, Tolstoy or Ivanov, Nanny, Russian journalism - in a word, not a common language, but an individual, blood dialect. The long-term habit of expressing myself in my own way did not allow me to be content with stencils in my newly chosen language - both the monstrous difficulties of the upcoming transformation, and the horror of parting with a living, tame creature, first plunged me into a state about which there is no need to dwell; I will only say that not a single writer standing at a certain level has experienced it before me.
I see intolerable shortcomings in such of my English works as, for example, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight” (“ True life Sebastian Knight" (English)); there is something satisfying to me in "Bend Sinister" and some of the individual stories that appeared from time to time in The New Yorker. The book “Conclusive Evidence” was written for a long time (1946-1950), with especially painful difficulty, because the memory was tuned to one mode - musically unspoken Russian - and another mode was imposed on it, English and detailed. In the resulting book, some of the small parts of the mechanism were of dubious strength, but it seemed to me that the whole worked quite well - until I took on the crazy task of translating Conclusive Evidence into my old, main language.
There were such shortcomings, such a disgusting expression, there were so many gaps and unnecessary explanations that an exact translation into Russian would be a caricature of Mnemosyne. Keeping the general pattern, I changed and added a lot. The proposed Russian book relates to the English text as capital letters relate to italics, or as a staring face looks at a stylized profile: “Let me introduce myself,” said my fellow traveler without a smile, “my last name is N.” We started talking. The road night flew by unnoticed. “So, sir,” he finished with a sigh. Outside the window of the carriage, a stormy day was already smoking, sad copses flashed by, the sky was white over some suburb, here and there windows in individual houses were still burning, or had already been lit... Here was the ringing of a guiding note.
CHAPTER FIRST
The cradle rocks over the abyss. Drowning out the whisper of inspired superstitions, common sense tells us that life is just a slit of weak light between two perfectly black eternities. There is no difference in their blackness, but we tend to look into the pre-life abyss with less confusion than into the one in which we fly at a speed of four thousand five hundred heartbeats per hour. I knew, however, a sensitive young man who suffered from chronophobia and in relation to the limitless past. With languor, downright panic, watching a home-made film shot a month before his birth, he saw a completely familiar world, the same situation, the same people, but he was aware that he was not in this world at all, that no one was aware of his absence notices and does not grieve for him. Particularly haunting and scary was the sight of a newly purchased baby carriage, standing on the porch with the smug inertness of a coffin; the carriage was empty, as if “when time converted into the imaginary value of the past,” as my young reader aptly put it, his very bones had disappeared.
Youth, of course, is very susceptible to such obsessions. And that is to say: if this or that good dogma does not come to the aid of free thought, there is something childish in an increased susceptibility to backward or forward eternity. In adulthood, the average reader becomes so accustomed to the incomprehensibility of everyday life that he treats with indifference the two black voids between which a mirage smiles at him, which he mistakes for a landscape. So let's limit our imagination. Only sleepless children or some genius wreck can enjoy its wondrous and painful gifts. In order for the delight of life to be humanly bearable, let us (says the reader) impose a measure on it.
I resolutely rebel against all this. I'm ready, before my own earthly nature, walking around with a rude sign in the rain, like an offended clerk. How many times have I almost dislocated my mind, trying to spot the slightest ray of the personal among the impersonal darkness at both ends of life? I was ready to become a co-religionist of the last shaman, just not to give up the inner conviction that I do not see myself in eternity only because of earthly time, which surrounds life like a blank wall. I climbed with my thoughts into the gray distance from the stars - but my palm still slid along the same completely impenetrable surface. It seems that except for suicide, I have tried all the options. I gave up my face in order to penetrate, like an ordinary ghost, into the world that existed before me.
I put up with the humiliating proximity of novelists babbling about various yogis and Atlantis. I even endured reports of mediumistic experiences of some English colonels in the Indian service, who quite clearly remembered their previous incarnations under the willows of Lhasa. In search of clues and clues, I rummaged through my earliest dreams - and since I started talking about dreams, please note that I unconditionally reject Freudianism and all the dark medieval background, with its manic pursuit of gender symbolism, with its gloomy embryos peeping from natural ambushes sullen parental intercourse.
At the beginning of my studies of the past, I did not quite understand that time, seemingly limitless at first glance, is actually a round fortress. Unable to break through into my eternity, I turned to studying its borderland—my infancy.
Year of writing:
1946
Reading time:
Description of the work:
In 1946, Eivind Jonson wrote the novel Surf and Shores. It should be noted that the works of this Swedish writer not many have been translated into Russian, although in general they are quite widespread and have received great recognition.
The novel “Surf and Shores,” a summary of which you will find below, was written at the very peak of Eivind Jonson’s work, and became one of his most successful novels.
Summary of the novel
Surf and shores
Ten years after the end of the Trojan War. The Messenger of the gods, Hermes, arrives on the island of the nymph Calypso, where Odysseus has been living for seven years, with a report and instructions: The time has come for the Wanderer to return home and restore order there. But Odysseus does not strive for Ithaca, because he understands that he will be forced to kill again, and he has always been not so much a king and a warrior as a plowman. He was forced to leave his homeland and take part in a war of conquest started by the Olympians to show that war is a “divinity” that requires sacrifice. And Odysseus sacrificed Troy, leaving for the war only to return quickly. But now the Wanderer is simply afraid to again feel the passage of time, which you don’t feel here, at Calypso. Maybe he was her prisoner, although he never tried to leave. Nevertheless, he has no choice: he must submit to the will of the gods.
...And in Ithaca in last years There really were riots. Penelope's suitors, who founded the Progress Party, wanting to seize the fortune and power of the Long-Absent Tsar, tried to force the Spouse to agree to the marriage, convincing her that she was ruined. But Penelope nevertheless remained a wealthy woman. Odysseus' nurse Eurycleia, the ubiquitous old woman, continually went to the mainland, where she carried on trade herself or through dummies. Economic and political struggle. The wife was playing for time: first, Eurycleia advised her to re-spin all the available wool (this took several years), and then, when the suitors cut off supplies, to begin making a burial cloth for her father-in-law, rumors of whose illness were still being spread by the same old woman.
The time for the Wanderer's departure is approaching. He would leave the place where he had tasted peace and go into the unknown, into a world that must have changed too much in the past twenty years. Back to the war, which is so dear to the gods, who do not want to see the human race as exalted and gentle, doing everything to bring out “a breed of people where men hastily lighten heavy flesh, a breed<…>men who do not have time to rest on a woman’s breast.”
...The political tricks of the Spouse did not please the Son, who in many ways was still a boy, naive and straightforward. Telemachus subconsciously felt that his mother. A middle-aged woman has already made her choice, and when Long-Waiting thinks about the young men who want her, her shuttle runs faster...
On the last night with the Nymph, the Wanderer tells her about what he had to experience. No, not to him, but to a man named Utis - Nobody. About how his companions mistook ordinary girls for sirens, and whirlpools for monsters, how, having drunk strong wine on the island of Kirki, they behaved like pigs... And also about how he is haunted by memories of the murder of Hector’s son, Astyanax. Not remembering who did it. Odysseus tries to convince himself that it was not him, but the war.
...The weaving continued for a long time. And the middle-aged woman yearned rather not for her Spouse, but for men in general. She didn’t know: being strong means waiting or taking care of your own life? Then she had to (at the prompting of Eurycleia) gradually unravel the canvas, not by deceiving, but “carrying out politics.” The suitors found out about everything before they officially announced it: they were not averse to taking advantage of other people's goods. But one way or another, the Cloth ruse was exposed, and Penelope was forced to promise to choose a new husband in a month.
Memories do not let go of Odysseus: he thinks too often about Troy, about the War and about the descent into Hades, which he saw in his delirium. Then the soothsayer Tiresias told the Wanderer that he would return home knee-deep in blood, when he no longer had the desire to return. And Odysseus will be unhappy until he finds people in the west who those who know the seas and wars. Then, perhaps, he will become the first person of a new breed, and happiness will smile on him.
Meanwhile, on the advice of a certain Mentes, Telemachus decides to go to Nestor and Menelaus to find out something about his father and prove to everyone that he himself has already grown up. The attempt to officially achieve this fails: the Progress Party is easily dissolved People's Assembly. The son has to go to Pylos secretly.
Odysseus's voyage begins well. But soon a storm, the wrath of Poseidon, hits him. The Wanderer spends several days in the raging waves until he lands on the shore. “I am a man far from the sea, I live.”
Pylos and its ruler Nestor disappoint Telemachus' expectations. The young man expected to see a mighty hero, but he meets a talkative old drunkard. Confused in his thoughts, he begins his memories with the words: “Well, first, of course, we killed the children...” Nestor never said anything definite about Odysseus.
The exhausted, hungry Wanderer finds himself in the lands of the Phaeacians, where he is found by Princess Nausicaa, a young girl dreaming of her One and Only, true hero. “...Real heroes are noble gentlemen, they do not kill children...” The Phaeacian king receives Odysseus as a welcome guest, and he gets the opportunity to rest a little. But even here he continues to remember Astyanax, who was killed by War. “I was a participant in the War. But War is not me.”
The Progress Party becomes aware that Telemachus has left, and the suitors decide to eliminate the Son as an extra obstacle to power over Ithaca (and then over the rest of the lands) as soon as possible. The spy informs Penelope about the suitors' plan, and Eurycleia immediately sends him to the mainland to warn Telemachus about the danger.
Meanwhile, at the feast of King Alcinous, the Wanderer reveals his real name: partly true, partly feigned excitement at the sounds of the song about Trojan War gives it away. Then he tells everyone about his wanderings, transforming them not in the main thing, but in the details. In order for people to believe him, he creates a legend, shrouded in an aura of divinity: a volcano turns into a cyclops, strong wine into a witchcraft drink, whirlpools into bloodthirsty monsters... Odysseus gets the Phaeacians to help him return to his homeland. Maybe he would have stayed here, having married Nausicaä, but it was too late. He will return to Ithaca and fulfill his appointed role as executioner.
The first person Odysseus meets when he gets home is the chief swineherd Eumaeus. Pretending that he did not recognize the King, he says that Odysseus, having set foot on the soil of Ithaca again, will still not return from the war, for he will start it all over again. He has no choice, because he is just a prisoner of the cheerful, playing gods that people themselves invented. Blood will flood not only the small island of Odysseus, but also all other countries. But probably. The king of Ithaca, having taken away power from the suitors and divided it among many citizens, will be able to lay the foundation of a new kingdom of man, when people themselves will understand who they are and what they should do. And then the power of the gods will no longer be able to drag them into new war.
Returning from his unsuccessful journey (Menelaus also did not say anything new and did not provide significant help), Telemachus meets his father, but does not recognize him: the man he saw was not like his dreams of Father, Hero and Protector. And Odysseus, having revealed his secret to his son, understands that the family will accept him, perhaps they will recognize his body, but never himself.
Disguised as a beggar, the Wanderer enters his home. Despite the constant insults of the suitors, it still seems to him that there is no need to kill them all and many can be spared... Unrecognized, he talks to his wife and realizes that he has returned too late: Penelope will of her own free will marry the one who will save her from twenty years of waiting, anxiety and melancholy.
According to the conceived plan for the extermination of the suitors, Telemachus announces that his mother will become the wife of the one who can shoot an arrow from Odysseus’s bow through the rings of twelve axes. Grooms cannot do this. They try to turn everything into a joke and, mocking Telemachus and the supposedly dead Odysseus, one after another confirm their death sentence. If the Traveler could have left at least one of them alive, he would have told himself that, neglecting the divine order, he managed to save Astyanax. But he came to kill. Taking the bow. Odysseus begins his mission.
And he kills them all. Subsequently, rumors exaggerated the number of victims of this massacre by almost five times. In fact, there were no more than twenty of them. A doll in the hands of the gods, the personification of war, Odysseus destroys the world on long years, shedding blood to the moans of a laboring slave coming from the servants' quarters. And Penelope is crying in her room, realizing that the useless debris of the war has deprived her of freedom of choice and the right to happiness...
When slaves are destroyed along with the suitors, they former lovers, Odysseus learns that they also want to remove the woman who gave birth and her child from the “world of those who are pure.” This decision causes the Wanderer to protest, because not a single child in this world has caused or will cause him harm. But it's' too late. Besides, he has no time to think about it: he must go on his journey, a long journey to the west. However, the wise old Eurycleia, smiling devotedly, stops him: “The journey is over, my child, the ships are pulled ashore for the winter. I have prepared a bath for you, my beloved master...”
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Vladimir Nabokov
Other shores
PREFACE TO THE RUSSIAN EDITION
The autobiography offered to the reader covers a period of almost forty years old the first years of the century to May 1940, when the author moved from Europe to the United States. Its goal is to describe the past with extreme accuracy and find meaningful outlines in it, namely: the development and repetition of secret themes in manifest destiny. I tried to give Mnemosyne not only freedom, but also law.
The basis and partly the original of this book was its American edition, Conclusive Evidence. Having a perfect command of both English and French from infancy, I would have switched from Russian to a foreign language for the needs of writing without difficulty, if I were, say, Joseph Conrad, who, before he began to write in English, had no trace in his native (Polish) language. He did not abandon literature, but skillfully used ready-made formulas in his chosen language (English). When, in 1940, I decided to switch to English, my trouble was that before that, for more than fifteen years, I wrote in Russian and during these years I left my own imprint on my instrument, on my intermediary. By switching to another language, I thus abandoned not the language of Avvakum, Pushkin, Tolstoy or Ivanov, Nanny, Russian journalism - in a word, not a common language, but an individual, blood dialect. The long-term habit of expressing myself in my own way did not allow me to be content with stencils in my newly chosen language - both the monstrous difficulties of the upcoming transformation, and the horror of parting with a living, tame creature, first plunged me into a state about which there is no need to dwell; I will only say that not a single writer standing at a certain level has experienced it before me.
I see intolerable shortcomings in such of my English works as “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”; there is something satisfying to me in "Bend Sinister" and some of the individual stories that appeared from time to time in The New Yorker. The book “Conclusive Evidence” was written for a long time (1946-1950), with especially painful difficulty, because the memory was tuned to one mode - musically unspoken Russian - and another mode was imposed on it, English and detailed. In the resulting book, some of the small parts of the mechanism were of dubious strength, but it seemed to me that the whole worked quite well - until I took on the crazy task of translating Conclusive Evidence into my old, main language.
There were such shortcomings, such a disgusting expression, there were so many gaps and unnecessary explanations that an exact translation into Russian would be a caricature of Mnemosyne. Keeping the general pattern, I changed and added a lot. The proposed Russian book relates to the English text as capital letters relate to italics, or as a staring face looks at a stylized profile: “Let me introduce myself,” said my fellow traveler without a smile, “my last name is N.” We started talking. The road night flew by unnoticed. “So, sir,” he finished with a sigh. Outside the window of the carriage, a stormy day was already smoking, sad copses flashed by, the sky was white over some suburb, here and there windows in individual houses were still burning, or had already been lit... Here was the ringing of a guiding note.
CHAPTER FIRST
The cradle rocks over the abyss. Drowning out the whisper of inspired superstitions, common sense tells us that life is just a slit of weak light between two perfectly black eternities. There is no difference in their blackness, but we tend to look into the pre-life abyss with less confusion than into the one in which we fly at a speed of four thousand five hundred heartbeats per hour. I knew, however, a sensitive young man who suffered from chronophobia and in relation to the limitless past. With languor, downright panic, watching a home-made film shot a month before his birth, he saw a completely familiar world, the same situation, the same people, but he was aware that he was not in this world at all, that no one was aware of his absence notices and does not grieve for him. Particularly haunting and scary was the sight of a newly purchased baby carriage, standing on the porch with the smug inertness of a coffin; the carriage was empty, as if “when time converted into the imaginary value of the past,” as my young reader aptly put it, his very bones had disappeared.
Youth, of course, is very susceptible to such obsessions. And that is to say: if this or that good dogma does not come to the aid of free thought, there is something childish in an increased susceptibility to backward or forward eternity. In adulthood, the average reader becomes so accustomed to the incomprehensibility of everyday life that he treats with indifference the two black voids between which a mirage smiles at him, which he mistakes for a landscape. So let's limit our imagination. Only sleepless children or some genius wreck can enjoy its wondrous and painful gifts. In order for the delight of life to be humanly bearable, let us (says the reader) impose a measure on it.
I resolutely rebel against all this. I am ready, in front of my own earthly nature, to walk around with a crude inscription in the rain, like an offended clerk. How many times have I almost dislocated my mind, trying to spot the slightest ray of the personal among the impersonal darkness at both ends of life? I was ready to become a co-religionist of the last shaman, just not to give up the inner conviction that I do not see myself in eternity only because of earthly time, which surrounds life like a blank wall. I climbed with my thoughts into the gray distance from the stars - but my palm still slid along the same completely impenetrable surface. It seems that except for suicide, I have tried all the options. I gave up my face in order to penetrate, like an ordinary ghost, into the world that existed before me.
I put up with the humiliating proximity of novelists babbling about various yogis and Atlantis. I even endured reports of mediumistic experiences of some English colonels in the Indian service, who quite clearly remembered their previous incarnations under the willows of Lhasa. In search of clues and clues, I rummaged through my earliest dreams - and since I started talking about dreams, please note that I unconditionally reject Freudianism and all the dark medieval background, with its manic pursuit of gender symbolism, with its gloomy embryos peeping from natural ambushes sullen parental intercourse.
At the beginning of my studies of the past, I did not quite understand that time, seemingly limitless at first glance, is actually a round fortress. Unable to break through into my eternity, I turned to studying its borderland—my infancy.