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"The Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science": Nabokov, Stravinsky, and the Reader as Listener LEON BOTSTEIN Parallel Lives In his meticulously prepared compendium of interview; Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov reprinted a 1970 response to a question posed by Alfred Appel about whether he knew Igor Stravinsky, "another outspoken émigré." Nabokov replied, "I know Mr. Stravinsky very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print."' Nabokov's response to Appel, one of the first and mast respected of Nabokov scholars, revealed an uncanny but not unexpected doubt about Stravinsky's role in the authorship of the (by then) extensive accumulation of Stravinsky-Craft volumes of conversations. The questions about Robert Craft's role and who was responsible for what appeared in print as Stravinsky's words remain matters of controversy' Craft's contribution was, if not decisive, then certainly substantial. He confessed to Stephen Walsh, with pride, that one reviewer of the 1959 Conversations expressed the opinion that "the two finest writers of English prose" were Russians: Nabokov and Stravinsky? The idea that Stravinsky was considered a "fine writer" surely irritatedNabokov. Such a notion revealed a familiar philistinism and stupidity, not entirely unrelated to the evils of poshlare, Nabokov's term for the fake suggestion of genuine art, refinement, and judgment so rampant in so-called civilized society.' Nabokov's subtly worded skepticism about the authorship of the volumes anticipated what has remained for scholars a source of ambiguity with respect to understanding Stravinsky, particularly in his American years. It seems that everything Stravinsky published, from his Autobiography of 1935 and 1936 to the 1939 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and the volumes with Craft was, if not ghostwritten, then the work of close collaboration? This does not disqualify the utility of what was pub- lished under Stravinsky's name as sources for understanding Stravinsky. But there are no grounds for elevating the composer to the stature of Nabokov as a writer.' Nabokov's aside about Stravinsky also needs to be read within the context of the writer's persistent comments about his own weak relationship to music. • 319 • EFTA01088921  NABOKO% STRAVINISKA; AND 111E RENDER AS LISTENER Even if we accept Nabokov's humorous descriptions of his imperviousness to music, the contact between these two prominent emigres during the American exile they shared was unexpectedly minimal, as many have noted.' They appear to have barely known each other. Stravinsky seems not to have read Nabokov, neither during the 1930s in Russian, nor in English in the 1950s and 1960s. After 1940 Nabokov took pains to protest his lack of musicality, even though he took ironic pride in being a descendant of Carl Heinrich Graun, a minor but well- regarded eighteenth-century composer, and took genuine pleasure that his only son, Dimitri, became an opera singer. "I have no ear for music—a shortcoming I deplore bitterly;" he confessed in a 1964 Playboy interview" Nabokov admitted to retaining a memory of unwanted attendance at operas during his childhood and having once translated Schubert song texts into Russian, but officially the art of music was foreign to him. "Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds," he wrote in Speak, Memory. In underscoring his distance from most modern poetry in 1969, he quipped: "I know as little about today's poetry as about new music."' Nonetheless, Alfred Appel suggested in 1967 that Nabokov was perhaps protesting too much about his lack of connection to music, an idea now increasingly supported in the critical literature.10 Appel argued that Nabokov's obsessions with memory, consciousness, time, and the structure of the novel all took on explicitly musical metaphors and analogies; perhaps Nabokov, by dismissing his connection to music, was following a time-honored tradition of intentionally throwing off his would-be interpreters. Stravinsky was, by all accounts, an avid reader. But he seems to have taken no interest in Nabokov the writer. The absence of any real contact between him and Nabokov, who both arrived in America from France within two years of each other and shared common cultural and historical origins, is even more remarkable given the tight interconnections (so vividly described in Pain) within Russian emigro circles. True, Nabokov resided in the East, and Stravinsky on the West Coast, until the mid-1960s, when he was already quite ill. But the two men seem also never to have met in Berlin or Paris, where both found themselves with some frequency, and were in contact with Russian émigrés in theme cities. Nabokov and Stravinsky had one significant friend in common, perhaps the only person to be in attendance at the funerals of both men, Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and controversial cultural impresario. Nicolas was a first cousin of the writer. His help for Nabokov extended to arranging lodgings (his ex- wife provided Vladimir and Vera Nabokov with their first home in America in 1940), and Vladimir was in intermittent social contact with him until his death." Stravinsky knew Nicolas from his Paris years, and throughout the American years he was among those closest to Stravinsky and worked hard to promote his music." Bringing Nabokov and Stravinsky together would have been easy. It appears that they may actually have avoided each other." • 320 • EFTA01088922  Ion &Wein Considering Stravinsky and Nabokov together for the mere fact of shared birthplace and common exile—first in Europe and then America—possesses a basic historical logic. There are obvious parallels in their lives, as well as key divergences that help explain the absence of contact. Despite the social distance between them, striking connections emerge between Stravinsky's music and Nabokov's prose when one compares their careers and work. They shared parallel premises and prejudices in their views on art. And their respective places in the history of modernism bear comparison. Upon closer inspection, the contrasts in biography stand out. The writer was seventeen years younger. Nabokov was born into a family of high aristocracy and great wealth. Stravinsky, in contrast, descended from petty aristocracy." He did his best to assert his aristocratic origins and prized his provenance of privilege and exclusivity, but the social gulf between them was marked. In their American years, Nabokov seems never to have complained about his loss of status and wealth and he did not try• to impress Americans with his ancestry. Stravinsky, in contrast, exaggerated his vanished social distinction and was notoriously obsessed about money. Both men had famous fathers, but Vladimir Nabokov idealized and idolized his whereas Igor Stravinsky seems only to have harbored resentment against his distinguished father, Russia's finest operatic bass before Fyodor Nabokov's parents, music lovers, were in the patron class. Chaliapin and Serge Koussevitzky performed in the Nabokov home, and perhaps so too did Igor's father.' Both the writer and the composer spent the interwar years in exile in Europe. Both lived at one time in Switzerland, a country for which each had a particular fondness. Stravinsky spent most of the years between 1917 and 1939 in France, whereas Nabokov chose Berlin. In Berlin Nabokov kept close to the Russian émigré community. Stravinsky had many Russian friends and colleagues in France, but he became a French citizen and emerged by the 1930s as the leading and most influential composer among the French. Ironically, Stravinsky's best foreign language from childhood was German. His French developed later, during his many years in France and in French-speaking Switzerland. Nabokov (for whom English was a childhood language and his second language) preferred French, his years in Berlin notwithstanding. He read German and spoke it, but never used it as a language of writing, even though he wrote most of his early novels in Germany. Stravinsky shifted from an initial hostility to the German cultural tradition in music to an increasing admiration and consideration of it as normative." He never could quite accommodate Wagner, but in his later years Beethoven and Schubert became important to him in a manner they had not been early in his career. By the mid-1930s he was most eager, despite the Nazi seizure of power, to gain acceptance in Germany. Nabokov was repulsed by things German, except for scientific works. His novels—particularly ding, Queen, Knave and The Gift—are peppered with contempt and parody of German habits and culture. For • 321 • EFTA01088923  NAROKCA: STRAVIMICY, AND 711E READER AS LISTENER Nabokov, the Germans came to be emblematic of the worst of pseudo-culture, prime purveyors of a particularly pretentious tradition of poshlost'.1S Nabokov; like his father, was an ardent foe of anti-Semitism. He despised not only the Nazi variety but also the anti-Semitism so commonplace within the Russian intelligentsia. Nabokov hated the fascists, and indeed all tyranny. The same cannot be said of Stravinsky. Stravinsky admired Mussolini; in 1936 he was annoyed only that ll Duce had no time for him." The text of Stravinsky's 1939 Norton Lectures, The Potties of Music, is marked by an obsessive assertion that the centrality of "the stern auspices of order and discipline- in modern life and art were being neglected. Stravinsky declared, "Nl clerli wan is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportion." This was "serious" since it challenged the "fundamental laws of human equilibrium." Whether intentionally or not, Stravinsky evoked the pseudo -historicaljustification peddled by purveyors of fascist ideology as the proper antidote to chaos and degeneracy. Stravinsky thought that the errors of contemporary culture revealed that "the mind itself is ailing." Much of the music of the time, Stravinsky told his audience, "carries within it the symptoms of a pathologic blemish and spreads the germs of a new original sin."1d His rhetoric possessed an uncanny and perhaps unintended family resemblance to the aesthetics favored by fascist regimes that defined "degenerate art" Despite Stravinsky's unambiguous dislike of the Soviets in the 1930s, the Eurasiansim he subscribed to led him to a critical skepticism in 1939 more implicitly consonant with the Stalinist dogma of the mid- and late 1930s that ostracized Dimitry Shostakovich and Gavriil Popov. The criticisms shared a tone of moral disapproval. In exile, Stravinsky not surprisingly developed an oven commitment to religion, in particular Russian Orthodoxy. And by the mid-1920s he assumed, under the guise of neoclassicism, a stark anti-modernist stance. Stravinsky had no use for socialist realism, but his problem with Russia under Communism was comparatively nuanced. During the years he flirted with Eurasianist notions, Stravinsky observed, "Now Russia has seen only AMSertdiall), without renewal or revolution without trodition."21 Nabokov shared none of this. Organized traditional religion remained foreign to him. He maintained the same strict and unwavering contempt for post-revolutionary Russia, the Soviets, as he did for the fascists. He kept his distance from all "isms." His views on human history and progress were linked to his own lifelong encounter with the detailed scientific observation of nature. Individuality and freedom in art and thought were endangered by the politics and culture of modern times. In 1937 Nabokov wrote, "The symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds ... and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle." For all his snobbery about writers past and present, Nabokov never strayed from the modernism he came to admire early in his career, that of Andrey Bely, Franz Kalka, the Proust of Sttann's Wrp., and theJoyce of Ublres.25 • 322 • EFTA01088924  Ion Boiskin Although both men were anti-communist, Nabokov's pessimism about modernity never led him down the more reactionary path taken by Stravinsky in the years between 1922 and the mid-1950s. Nabokov feared the populist embrace of the despotic imposition of order and discipline in political life—including the sort of uniform assertion of a "healthy" social utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Hitler and Stalin. He also did not romanticize autocracy, including that of the czars before 1917. The trap faced by Adam Krug, Nabokov's protagonist in Bend Sinister, is the futility and self-destructiveness of any struggle to hold on to a shred of individuality, genuine refinement, originality, and morality—particularly by engaging with language, thought, literature, and culture—in the context of modern dictatorship. The pretense of value on behalf of culture and the making of art itself are complicit in concealing this trap—a truth grasped by Ember, the Shakespeare translator and Krug's friend in Bend Sinister? The cult of self-improving culture displayed in Intent by Dolores Haze (consider the meaning of the name) and the sort of bad art associated with middle-class, semi-educated taste for the sentimental and the emotionally illustrative provide no protection against barbarism and violence. Humbert Humbert's highly cultivated and persuasive tastes in literature, music, and art, his evidently learned superiority over the Americans he meets seduces the reader; Humbert's aesthetic sensibility, even his capacity for poetic eloquence, makes the case for his defense hard to resist. Yet connoisseurship does not prevent his crimes. It merely softens the cruelty and deepens the plausibility of rationalization. Whether delivered by would-be individualists like Humbert or bureaucrats and dictators who create concentration camps, aesthetic gifts and cultural sensibilities fail, for Nabokov, as antidotes to the evil in modern life? When Humbert Humbert chases Clare Quilty, attempting to shoot him, his victim "sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman's chest near the piano."' Nabokov could not have evoked a more effective caricature of the pretentions of the modern piano virtuoso and the cheap, illustrative Romanticism of the kind Stravinsky also despised, and the futility of a tradition of cultural consumption (the seaman's chest) as means of escape from a fatal barbarism that threatens the survival of morality, civility, and the humane—much less that of talent, originality, beauty, and learning For Nabokov, the Russia of his youth was personal; it vanished and lived only in his memory The pretense of finding in the past a legitimate basis for nostalgia held no allure. In his adult life Nabokov remained resistant to organized causes and ideologies, including patriotism and cultural chauvinism. Although Russian was his primary language, the Russia that continued to occupy him was his own invention, and bore little, if any relation to the Russia that existed after 1917. • 323 • EFTA01088925  NABOKO% STRATI:NNW% AND 711E RENDER AS !ENTERER He never sought to return to Russia or to maneuver to gain access to readers in Soviet Russia. Stravinsky on the other hand held on to the idea of an ongoing residual national solidarity, while rejecting a narrow nationalism. He saw himself as a supranational, universal figure above politics. Yet he subordinated his distaste for Communism and joined with other emigres in taking some pride in the Soviet part of the Allied war effort in the 194,0s. Stravinsky may have been ambivalent about returning to Russia, but he calculated correctly that if he did, he would return in triumph—which happened in 1962, after an absence of fifty years. He embraced the Russia he encountered on that trip; it evoked not only nostalgia but also a renewed sense of connection. Stravinsky rose to fame in 1913 with The Rile of Spriq not as an exile, but as a Russian composer on a voluntary, temporary sojourn from Russia, the sort of visit to the West commonplace in the history of Russian music and literature, as seen in the examples of Pyotr Tchaikovsky Nikolay Gogol, Alexander Scriabin, and Ivan Turgeneu In contrast, Nabokov's great fame occurred in the context of involuntary exile. He always resented comparison withJoseph Conrad. Conrad was not an exile. He had no career as a Polish writer. Nabokov was a respected writer of Russian poetry and prose. Like Conrad, he achieved worldwide fame as a writer in English. But Nabokov did so while maintaining an explicit commitment to a particular tradition of Russian literature. His harsh loyalty to the virtue of literal translation (and skepticism about any other sort) was rooted in a view of the indivisible uniqueness of langrurge. Its meanings were contingent on specificity, on time and place. In the end, however, Nabokov's origins as a Russian did not define him in America, despite his teaching of Russian language and literature in a manner that suggested an indisputably superior knowledge and authority. The works that made him famous—bliia, Ain, and Pale Fist—were all novels located in America. In Stravinsky's case, the explicitly Russian aspects of his music never disappeared, no matter how subtly altered and camouflaged, and actually helped shape some of his Rest music written in America. With his Russian influences intact, Stravinsky influenced decisively the direction of French music between the early 1920s and 1940. The role he played in French musical life as a lionized personality was analogous to the place Nabokov came to occupy as a writer in America from the late 1950s until his death in 1977. If Stravinsky's breakthrough came in 1913, Nabokov's occurred between 1955 and 1958 with the publication of Lorna in Paris and New York Both artists experienced—at different stages of their careers—a sudden burst of worldwide notoriety because of the scandal associated with a single work. Stravinsky became world-famous at age thirty He arrived in America a well-known, influential, and admired figure, which led to the invitation to give the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard. Stravinsky complained constantly about money, but he came to America without the sort of dire financial worries common among emigres (consider the fate of the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who died in penury and • 324 • EFTA01088926  Ian Boiskin obscurity in 1942 in Larchmont, New York). When Nabokov arrived in 1940, he brought with him at best an arcane reputation limited to emigre circles. He was in desperate straits. Among those prepared to help him were Sergey Rachtnaninoff and Serge Koussevitzky, who pmvided the affidavit. Nabokov's rise to the status of a superstar came when he was in his late fifties. As Stravinsky with the Rik, Nabokov was made famous by the surface of a single work, Lolira, rather than by the work's greatness and importance as ultimately identified by a common critical consensus. With respect to the Rile, the choreography and the spectacular orchestral sonorities and effects generated the scandal. In the case of bilk, the predictably reductive account of the plot and overt subject of the novel, the sexual passion for a "nymphet," made the writer rich and famous—not its language and structure or its many tantalizing asides. Stravinsky's renown when he arrived in America came about partly through the proselytizing of Nadia Boulanger, with whom Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and many others had studied, and this identity he retained. Nevertheless Stravinsky, like Nabokov, faced the problem of how to establish himself in America. Robert Craft was central to this process, helping to reinvent the composer's image. Stravinsky was always keenly attuned to the winds of fashion and the critical reaction to his own music. His disappointment at the reception of his 1951 opera The Rake's Progress, a work that many have regarded as the culmination of the composer's romance with the "order and discipline" of neoclassicism— understood strictly as evocative of eighteenth-century practices—motivated him to explore serialism, with Craft's help and Ernst Krenek's guidance. The major works of his final serial period, along with Craft's deft handling of the composer as a personality, helped place Stravinsky within the center of American classical musical life. Craft's role made the output of new music possible. Yet despite this remarkable late period, the repertoire that defined the composer's public persona to the end of his life was that written before the American years. Nabokov did not have a past visible to his new American public. And he did not require a Craft to assist him. Yet, as Nabokov freely admitted, his entry into the American literary workl would certainly have been even more difficult than it turned out to be without the critic Edmund Wilson. In the end, however, Nabokov achieved his own carefully crafted iconic status as an American writer through the works he wrote in English. The supposed poetic masterpiece around which Pate Fin is constructed is evidence of Nabokov's deep immersion into American life and letters. Nabokov's Russian noveLs gained a wide reading public only in retrospect after Ulla—a pattern between old and new work that is the exact reverse of Stravinsky's Nabokov used his American success to withdraw, in part, from America. Living in Montreux for his final sixteen years, he continued to assert his affection and allegiance to America; he maintained his prominence in the world of letters from afar and continued to write in English. "I am trying to develop, in this rosy exile, the same fertile nostalgia in regard to America, my new country, as I evolved • 325 • EFTA01088927  NABOKO% STRAVIINSKN AND 771E READER AS LISTENER for Russia, my old one."" His move was only in a minor way a move "back" It ought not be compared to the return to Europe of Thomas Mann, Theodor W. Adorn, or Paul Hindemith—none of whom ever considered America a plausible second home. Craft may have briefly considered getting Stravinsky to move back to Switzerland in the 1960s, but Stravinsky never truly considered returning to Europe after 1945. When he decided to leave the West Coast in the 1960s, he settled in New York. He managed, like Nabokos to balance his own construct of a lost homeland with affection for his new American home. In the end, however, he was buried in Venice, near Diaghilev: Method and Influence Richard Taniskin, in his brilliant, definitive, and exhaustive two-volume account of Stravinsky's career through to the composition of Mann in 1922—with its epilogue on the composer's final masterpiece, the 1964 Requiem Confider— has painstakingly and persuasively described the defining early phases of the composer's career.'" These modes of engagement with Russian traditions and contemporaries shaped the composer's method and aesthetic. Stravinsky's music, from the 1920s to the 1960s, reveals a lasting debt to Russian sources, the Russian context in which he came of age, and the manner in which he transformed Russian elements in the first years of exile in Switzerland." The &artifice and The Firebird display the young composer's initial debt to a late nineteenth-century aesthetic, an older Romantic nationalism in which folklore was adapted into music for the stage and domestic use—the Kuchkist heritage of the so-called Mighty Five. Stiavinsky, as his comments on Tchaikovsky suggest, also sought to prove himself within the Rimsky-Korsakov circle by demonstrating his command of the craft of composition defined in the German-centered "Western European" terms of Glazunov's more conservative formalism. That craft involved the display of symphonic thinking, in which a dynamic if not self-declared organic logic drives the use and transformation of harmony and melody There, harmony serves a functional purpose in shaping musical time and structure, providing context for the process of thematic transformation, development, and recapitulation. These in turn generate audience expectations and the mechanisms by which instrumental music can appear to mimic narrative patterns in prose. These strategies made it possible for composers successfully to occupy duration and recalibrate long stretches of time. The Russian music of the 1880s and '90s was Stravinsky's initial formative aesthetic environment.It can be taken, with its nationalist colorings, as the musical equivalents of the literary realism that dominated Russian literature, if not into the early I9Ofis, then, at minimum, until the mid- 1880s, after the death of Czar Alexander II.' Social and political content and straightforward narrative and plot • 326 • EFTA01088928  lion Holstein structure dominated, whereas matters of style, the self-conscious awareness of form, or any pretense to rendering prose closer to the poetic were subordinated. Literature, notably in the case of Dostoevsky and the later Tolstoy, became a prose forum for ideas—mostly on behalf of social and political changes that could elevate the moral significance and worth of all human beings. Method and form were contingent on a commitment to realism. The spiritual betterment of the reader became a goal. Ideas were rendered through action, description, and dialogue. The reader was drawn in by the writer's manipulation of the illusions of sequential time and pictorial realism. Not surprisingly, one of Nabokov's father's favorite novelists was Charles Dickens. Although Nabokov was considerably younger than Stravinsky, they both confronted these qualities, colored by nationalist sentiment, as the dominant aesthetic credo of their parents' generation. Whether in prose or in music, the objective was to use aesthetic conventions to master the suggestion and evocation of content whose plausibility was located in methods of persuasion tied to realist criteria. Stravinsky, even when he abandoned the Rimsky-Korsakov model, sustained a nationalist impetus by drawing on more ethnographically authentic sources of Russian folk music. But he located new formal possibilities for music in their melodic and rhythmic elements and articulated a nationalist sensibility less defined by the aesthetics of Romanticism and at once more novel and authentic. His means deviated from the program music tradition and were influenced by the ideas of contemporaries, several linked to the Mir ubustes (World of Art) circle—Serge Diaghilev, Leon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois in particular. The last two were themselves part of the circle of artists around the Nabokov family. The vogue for symbolism and synesthesia, particularly in the work of Bely and Scriabin, also played a role in shaping the path Stravinsky took. In the Rile, Stravinsky used abstraction of the archaic Russian materials he appropriated to achieve an "architectural" rather than "anecdotal" use of musical time. Repetition in the form of sustained rhythmic pulsation was juxtaposed with abrupt harmonic shifts and changes in sonority at odds with the tradition of the symphony. The combinatorial ingenuity Stravinsky revealed (meant here not strictly in the sense defined by Milton Babbitt) employed the octatonic scale and intervallic cells—"a syntax of subsets and super-sets" derived from them." With that as a base he pursued intentional "simplification"—the abstraction of genuine folk melodic and rhythmic usage. This led Stravinsky to achieve what Taruskin describes as "a hard-nosed esthetic modernism."" Harmony was no longer directional and dynamic, but static. The effect was not unlike the visual aesthetic pursued by Nicholas Roerich, the designer of the first Rite production. Roerich, working from the suggestion of authentic national antique sources, produced flat, static, frozen imagery further abstracted from any form of realism by the stark uninflected use of color and the reduction of perspective; uxtapased geometric patterns in the visual frame undercut the nominal suggestion of narrative meaning" • 327 • EFTA01088929  NABOKOM STRAVINSKY, AND 711E RENDER AS IISTENER By the time he composed the RileStravinsky, distancing the experience of musical time from traditional expectations, had shifted the relationship of the listener to a musical work away from an analogy with that of a reader following a narrative. In the realist novel, opera, and Romantic symphony, the plausibility of an imagined past, present, and future, occurring in a logical sequence had been enhanced by the realist plainness (or naturalistic resemblance) of prose style (including dialogue) and the manipulation of the narrative voice. In music, these expectations among listeners had been amply met by the techniques of musical usage of both sides of the apparent divide between the circles around Tchaikovsky and Rimsky- Korsakm But with the Rile, anticipation and release as well as recollection during the act of listening were subordinated to the intensity of the momentary encounter with sound and the unprepared contrasts in the sharply delineated sequence of events. Music intensified the experience of time in the immediacy of its encounter, emancipating it from any dependence on recapitulation and foregrounding accumulation. Stravinsky's Rile appeared in direct conflict with musical realism's most skilled practitioner of the fin de siecle, Richard Strauss, notably his two last symphonic works, the Sinfirria Deinatita and the Alpine Symphony. However fierce the antipathy may have been between the Kuchkists and their opponents (or between the Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians), the advent of modernism circa 1913 in Stravinsky unmasked what all of these separate camps held in common in terms of the function of harmony and the character of form, and therefore the construct of musical time. Whether formalist (in the sense of Eduard Hanslick and later Stravinsky himself, who in his autobiography never tired of underscoring the idea that music expressed nothing except itself), or blatantly illustrative, as in Wagner's, Liszt's, and Strauss's compositions, musical time had been controlled by convention so as to confirm the apparent reality of a past and present moment, and the existence of a causal nexus analogous to the empirical experience of events or its linguistic representation. Art sought to engender either a remembered, imagined, or implied narrative? Stravinsky's achievement in the 1913 Rile and more strikingly in 1917 with La Notes— a distillation of a modernist aesthetic out of neo-nationalist material using simplification and abstraction that recalibrated the experience of time and defined a style—can be compared with the project that Nabokov undertook as a novelist in his twenties, after his years at Cambridge and his move to Berlin. Nabokov shared sources of inspiration with his older composer compatriot, notably the Mir iskzssiva movement that argued the autonomy of the aesthetic and the primacy of matters of style and form against the inherited utilitarian aesthetics of realism. Symbolism and the World of Art movement motivated Stravinsky and Nabokov to question the claim of a correspondence between aesthetic experience and the quotidian encounter with experienced time, both measured and remembered. This challenge to the traditional logic of art extended to a critique of the late Tolstoy's insistence that there be an evident moral and, by implication, redemptive • 328 • EFTA01088930  Leon Harkin justification beyond a purely aesthetic one. Stravinsky and Nabokov experimented not only in terms of their engagement with their respective traditions in Russian music and literature, but in terms of the fundamental character, function, and purpose of the work of art and its relationship to its audience, the link between literature and reader or music and listener. The Gift,Nabokov's last novel from his Berlin years (and for some his finest) is in part framed by two exchanges between the two most sympathetic figures in the book Fyodor, the nominal protagonist, who writes a satirical, almost Gogol- like biography of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (the arch-realist of the nineteenth century and a favorite of Lenin and the Soviets), and Koncheyev, the poet. In the first exchange Fyodor asserts, quoting Koncheyev, "Yes, some day I'm going to produce prose in which `thought and music are conjoined as are the folds of life in sleep."' Thinking in words is idealized by language's musical properties— its sounds and rhythms—not meanings that might be detached from sound and form. For the young Nabokov, the writing of literature was framed by language that revealed a nonlinear temporal logic outside of ordinary time, comparable to the distortion of time in dreams, yet possessed of a precision reminiscent of science and susceptible to being captured in works. In the second exchange Fyodor picks up this theme (one Nabokov woukl return to explicitly at the end of Ada, or Ardor): It would be a good thing in general to put an end to our barbaric perception of time... . Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies a constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future. Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past—an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us... . The theory I find most tempting—that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness—is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others?' Nabokov attempted to find the "radiance outside our blindness" by writing a poetic prose that treated language as music—shattering the inherited narrative and stnictural conventions of the novelistic form of realism and locating in its place an alternate sensibility that transcended the mundane. Despite the evident contrasts, this project took shape in a manner comparable to Stravinsky's evolution from the 1907 Symphony in E-flat to the 1917 Let Xocn. Nabokov experimented not only with language at every point in a novel (or short story)—each unit of which was ultimately contained on index cards—but in the overall structure, routinely divorcing each novel from following an inherited model as a sequential narrative • 329 • EFTA01088931  NAROKCA: STRAVINSKN; AND 771E RENDER AS LISTENER marked by character development and a clear demarcation of past, present, and future. Stravinsky, by rejecting the symphonic model and the conventions of late nineteenth-century musical continuity, formed what Edward T Cone identified as a "method" in three parts: stratification, interlock, and synthesis." These three terms could also be applied to Nabokov's novels from the 1930s, particularly The GO and Invitation toe &heading, and those from the 1950s, particularly &lila and Min. The privileging of the aesthetic pioneered by the World of Art movement and the symbolists of the Silver Age in Russia offered both Stravinsky and Nabokov ideological bases for shifting the criteria of an artwork from matters of content to those of structure and form. Within formal criteria, style and method were foregrounded. Cone identified the use of successive "time-segments" in the 1920 Symphonies d'insinitnents d ceet.98 Each of these is suspended, creating opportunities for their employment in contrapuntal usage. The synthesis comes not in a climax, but in the reduction or the assimilation of one element into another. Bridges and divergences are common. Stratification wing discrete musical variables defines Stravinsky's compositional procedure well into the music of the I 9‘10s; in Cone's view, it also describes the way in which the strong tonal components of the 1930 Symphony of Psalms are organized. Another way of imagining Stravinsky's method in the Symphonies that:mems d um is, as Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger have argued, to apply the metaphors of montage and collage in which the structural relationship and identity of disparate fragments are altered and manipulated, generating an overarching unified framework in which the discrete elements remain visible." Taruskin has perhaps the most elaborate and persuasive way of characterizing Stravinsky's novel approach to form, for which he uses the Russian term drobnose, or "splinteredness," a "sum of parts."' The parallels to such procedures can be found in Nabokov in the fragmentation of time, the subtly arranged but sudden shills in voice, and in the inconsistent presence of the narrator. Nabokov's "time fragments" are deployed so as to create ambiguities between the real and imagined. The reader is continually alert to the persistent shedding of the illusions of realist narration; just as the listener to Stravinsky is struck by the distinct substance of each musical moment apart from any functional implication backward or forward, Nabokov's reader is forced to confront sentences and paragraphs as stylistic entities, with significance apart from any overarching narrative frame. Literature, insofar as it is part of "the forces of imagination," is a "force of good," Nabokov observed in 1965. Translating The Eye more than three decades after its publication, Nabokov confessed he was in search of the "reader who catches on at first"; this reader will derive "genuine satisfaction," but from more than a story." Nabokov's ideal reader is asked to jettison the commonsense notion of language as representational or corresponding to an external reality. A different sort of precision is required. Stylistic self-awareness of how observation can be discussed alters the perception of elapsed time and preserves it in memory. The more detailed, the more unusual • 330 • EFTA01088932  Lion Holstein and poetic, the more vivid. Through writing fired by the poetic imagination a new reality comes into being that is more real than the "real" itself. The framing of the novels—visible in the cloaked identity of the narrator in Pnitr, in the construction of Pale The out of segments of commentary that follow a text and scramble past, present, and future and the multiple identities of its protagonist Kinbote; in the form of bat as an account by a man awaiting trial; or in the uncertain connection to dream life and everyday existence in Doair, Invitation ton Re/trading, and Rind Sinister-suggest parallels to Stravinsky's procedures of stratifying elements that have been abstracted from otherwise familiar patterns. In music, pitch and rhythm are the elements in play; in prose they are words, plot, time, and character. Nabokov's method of collage and montage is clearest in his use of time, his layering of perspectives using fragments of memory and distortions of the way time is segmented into a sequence of past, present, and future." Nabokov's syntactic inventiveness, his vinucksic use and invention of words, his nearly Shakespearean synthesis of word use and thought, as well as his assemblage of the novel by the ordering of completed units (his beloved index cards) show his literary method as not dissimilar from musical composition as practiced by Stravinsky. Stravinsky's meticulous habits in the process of composition, as understood by theorists and as evident in the manuscripts of The Rake's Progress and the &liana Canticles (to cite just two often reproduced examples), suggest that Nabokov and Stravinsky shared an innovative combinatorial genius:" Consider, for example, the elegance, variety, and ingenuity in the disposition of intervals and sonorities in the Requiem amides as analogous to the illusory simplicity of the relationship of poem to commentary in Pale The. Kinbote, with knowing irony, speaks early of the one line that "would have completed the symmetry" of Shade's poem. Nabokov has him end this thought by writing "damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinatorial turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth." Yet deformation precisely describes what he as a novelist and Stravinsky as composer, in their relationship to the traditions in their respective arenas, actually accomplished. The deformation and meddling were directed at the narrative conventions of form and continuity that derived their power from a presumed correspondence to lived experience that was ultimately banal. Nabokov was fabled for his visual acuity. His love of Sherlock Holmes rested less on the detective's deductive powers than on his eye for detail. Nabokov's meticulous work on butterflies, his fanatical concern for the accuracy of descriptive detail, his poetic response to landscape in his novels all attest to the primacy of attention to the smallest detail in a work of art and the imagination. "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."" No wonder he derided novelists of "general" ideas who penned prosaic sentences filled with the vocabulary of • 33t • EFTA01088933  NABORTN, STRAVIINSKY, AND 711E RENDER AS LISTENER abstraction. In Speak, Memory Nabokov pointed to the moment of intense sight as the means by which the finest that is human can stake its claim: It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower 16 In Nabokov's writing, the aural experience in the present moment, not only the visual, mirrors "the heightened terrace of consciousness" that can be set to words. At stake is not a talent for synesthesia (as with the Lithuanian composer Mikalojus (iurlionis, who perceived color and sound at one and the same time) or its ideology (as developed by Scriabin).' Nabokov did, however, recall that the imagining of the outline of a single letter of the alphabet produced a "fine case of colored hearing"18 But Nabokov's memories were framed not only by sight but by sounds—a "throbbing tambourine," "trilling" nightingales, the sounds of village musicians, the rhythm of Mademoiselle's speech." King Charles in Mk Fire was a musician. Nabokov routinely praised poetry in terms of music (its "contrapuntal pyrotechnics"), and for its music ("that dim distant music")" Cincinnatus C. recalls the world being "hacked" into "great gleaming blocks" by the "music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianofortes' Indeed, for Nabokov, the power of music and of sound—beyond all its links to memory—was that it intensified the ordinary consciousness of time understood as a continuum along the lines of the quotidian52 The short story "Music" revolves around the perception that music easily links present with past.' At the same time Nabokov grasped the need to deviate from a sense of time located in nature. Music was an art that, like poetry, could expand time. ICinbote, defending his friendship with Shade, credited his short acquaintance with the capacity of the aesthetic to defy the calendar, creating "inner duration," "eons of transparent time" independent of external "rotating malicious music."5. Nabokov's view is not entirely dissimilar to Stravinsky's. The composer wrote in his autobiography, "Music is the overarching domain in which man realizes the present." Music's sole purpose was to establish "an order in things" and especially "the coordination between man and time." Music redefines time in the present and gives "substance" and "stability" to "the category of the present."" Art and Time Stravinsky and Nabokov shared an obsession with how the aesthetic realm might influence the phenomenon of time perception, despite a surface of divergence between the two: Nabokov struggled against the tyranny of a seemingly objective • 332 • EFTA01088934  lion Holstein and uniform construct of time, whereas Stravinsky attempted to deepen the sense of the present through musical construction. For both, nostalgia and memory were tied to the experience of time, and both struggled to come to terms with the link between past and present. In their various speculations, both also drew on two common sources: Henri Bergson and Andrey Bely. Writing about Stravinsky in 1949, Craft mentions Stravinsky's having read Bergson.* Whether he actually did so or learned of Bergson's ideas from Pyotr Suvchinsky and Paul Valery in the 1920s, the philosophical connection Bergson forged between the experience of time in the present and the expression of the human creative force left a lasting impression on the composer's beliefs about the character and function of music." Music, by framing and in fact stopping the ordinary experience of time so that it appeared always in the present, rendered music "petrified" architecture and deepened the consciousness of human creativity. Nabokos who had a more complex understanding of time, was also influenced by Bergson, whom he admitted reading avidly in the interwar years.* With Stravinsky, musical time—defined as the extension and construction of the present moment—reappears as well in the late work, mostly as a result of his encounter with the music of Anton von Webern. Predominant in this music are silence as a component of compositional structure and the ascetic economic manipulation of sonority, mostly in units of short duration; the result is a heightening and deepening of time in the moment of listening. For Nabokov the issue of time, always present in the novels, took center stage in the 1960s in Ada. The "flowering of the present," as Van Veen in Ada put it, demanded the awareness that time is "vaguely connected to hearing"; the apprehension of time requires "the utmost purity of consciousness," which is not spatial and visual but aural? The key is that the "still fresh past" defines the present. The "present" slips in when we inspect "shadow sounds." The "dim intervals between the dark beats" of the authentic rhythm of time offer merely the "feel of the texture of Time." Nabokov concluded: "Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the 'lowness.' The synchronized flow of time as measured by clocks was itself an illusion, since the boundaries between past and present were if not fluid, interdependent, with the selective consciousness of the past defining the present and then subsequently the reverse, in which the past becomes circumscribed by the sense of the present moment.61 This fluidity reveals itself in the movement back and forth in time in Nabokov's narrative voice. His characters take the same journey—often so deftly from the reader's perspective that the shifts become noticeable only