This article by Erik Eklund, which was originally a portion of thesis A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Originality and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, was first published in Literature and Theology, Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2022, Pages 298–315. It has been slightly revised for style.
I: INTRODUCTION
Dismantling the pervasive belief that Vladimir Nabokov’s stance towards ‘organized mysticism, religion, [and] the church—any church’ is one of ‘utter indifference’ will take time, since it is Nabokov himself who attests to this ‘utter indifference’.[1] Notwithstanding his personal testimony, little critical attention has been paid to interrogating the form of ‘utter indifference’ and whether this rather personal confession of indifference may be univocally applied to Nabokov’s work. With few exceptions, scholars take for granted that the a-religious beliefs of Nabokov the historical person hold interpretative authority over the ‘particular clusters’ of ‘identifiable habits of writing and narrating’ which make up Nabokov the author—what Michael Wood calls the ‘performance on the sheets of paper’ bearing Nabokov’s authorial trace, his style and signature.[2] (It is this latter Nabokov that is the focus of this article.) This conflation of various Nabokovs has led to the general critical consensus that the biblical and theological imaginary of the Christian tradition is for the totus Nabokov, as it were, a topos from which a mature stylist must necessarily graduate, an exclusively literary artefact whose religious, mystical or otherwise theological insight finds neither correlation nor corresponding expression in his art.[3] Thus, even as ‘the Christian topoi’ may ‘all but vanish from the poet’s repertoire’ from the moment of Nabokov’s civil marriage to Véra Slonim in 1925, as Sergei Davydov claims, matters are patently different for Nabokov the novelist, as Christopher Link, Samuel Schuman and Gavriel Shapiro each demonstrate.[4] It stands to reason, therefore, that Nabokov’s profession is rather dubiously intended to safeguard a carefully crafted authorial persona. One wonders if Vivian Darkbloom doth protest too much, if ‘perhaps the author’s failure to acknowledge a reference, source, subtext or intertext’, suggests Priscilla Meyer, ‘is a denial of influence motivated by rivalry’.[5]
However one might interpret Nabokov’s professed indifference to religion, mysticism and theology, Nabokov’s 1962 metafictional masterpiece, Pale Fire, betrays a measured though nonetheless peculiar engagement with theological ideas and sources. Focusing on the novel’s theological centre—Charles Kinbote’s note to line 549 of John Shade’s poem (‘While snubbing gods, including the big G’), which records Kinbote’s conversation with Shade on 23 June 1959 about religion and God—this article uncovers Pale Fire’s direct engagement with core tenets of the apophatic theologies of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, and argues, moreover, that this works to highlight the analogy which the novel seeks to express between theological and literary discourse. As a close reading, however, this article is not concerned with what the subtextual presence of either theologian, either throughout the novel or in an isolated scene, might suggest relative to ongoing debates concerning the novel’s internal structure and author. Accordingly, this article, for no other reason than to prevent readers from gliding into deeper and darker waters than they might care to probe, proceeds according to a cursory reading of the novel’s structure and assumes no ghosts walk. In other words, Charles Kinbote is a real person (relative to the novel, of course) and author of the epigraph, foreword, commentary and index which surround ‘Pale Fire’, the posthumously published poem composed by John Shade, who is also a real person.
II: ‘WHILE SNUBBING GODS, INCLUDING THE BIG G’: MISQUOTES, PARAPHRASES AND MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
Taking form as a recapitulation of Kinbote’s conversation with Shade on the night of 23 June 1959, Kinbote’s note to line 549 marks the climax of the novel’s theological aspect. The theological significance of the date of this conversation has not been observed. 23 June is St John’s Eve, the eve of John the Baptist’s feast day. Intimately associated with Midsummer throughout European and Slavic countries, St John’s Day (otherwise known throughout Slavic countries as Kupala Night or Ivan-Kupala) is often celebrated the night before. The most common form of celebration involves lighting bonfires or torches as an emblem of St John the Baptist, whom Jesus calls ‘a burning and shining lamp’ (John 5:35 NRSV). This is noteworthy, since not only does the saintly John beg the question of Shade’s saint-like identity, but Kinbote (Nabokov’s only religious narrator) seems somehow aware of the religious significance of this date as he, in an ultimately metafictional gesture, states that it is as a pale fire at first, a pale fire throughout, and in the eschaton as an enrapturing flame that the pilgrim perceives God’s presence, much as the reader of Pale Fire might sense the presence of its evasive author(s).
KINBOTE: With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is—even from a proud infidel’s point of view!—to accept God’s Presence—a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said—
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, ‘One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is’. I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one’s rattling throat, not the black hum in one’s ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (C549)[6]
Also important to observe is that Kinbote plays with the title of Shade’s poem (which is also the title of the novel which he and Shade inhabit) nine days before Shade begins writing his poem, whose title Shade would not receive for another twenty-eight days. One gets the sense that a bigger game is being played, one with theological connotations which the reader must not ignore.
Most peculiar in this regard is Shade’s exasperated question to Kinbote, which begs the question not only of the location(s) of other quotations from Augustine (there are no others), but whether Kinbote is actually quoting Augustine.[7] The sentiment is broadly Augustinian, of course; however, there is good reason to challenge the Augustinian provenance of the quotation, since these words are not to be found anywhere in Augustine’s corpus. Of all Augustine’s works translated into English prior to the publication of Pale Fire, the closest approximation is traceable to Arthur West Haddan’s 1887 translation of De Trinitate (On the Trinity): ‘For when we aspire from this depth to that height, it is a step towards no small knowledge, if, before we can know what God is, we can already know what He is not’.[8] In fact, Kinbote’s quotation is syntactically closer to the language of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiæ, as translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province in 1947. ‘We cannot know what God is’, states Aquinas in the introduction to Question 3 in the prima pars, ‘but rather what He is not.’[9] If it is truly the case, however, that it is Aquinas rather than Augustine whom Kinbote is quoting, Kinbote has still failed to quote the Angelic Doctor. (The same is true, of course, if Kinbote is ‘quoting’ Augustine.) Nevertheless, even as Kinbote’s quotation fails as a word-for-word quotation of Aquinas, it falls even shorter of a thought-for-thought paraphrase of Augustine. Whereas Augustine takes for granted that one can arrive at positive knowledge of what God is (the emphasis being rather upon the order by which one comes to this knowledge), Kinbote and Aquinas affirm only an apophatic knowledge of God. One can only know what God is not.
The attempt to determine the veracity of Thomist ascription presents a double bind: either Nabokov unintentionally erred or Nabokov has deceived his readers by causing Kinbote to err. If Nabokov erred by misattributing to Augustine what is in fact Aquinas, then it is paramount to consider whether he had any awareness of the Dominican (as the similarity between the two statements suggests) as well as the form and content of this awareness. On the other hand, if knowledge of Aquinas is considered untenable, such that it seems most reasonable to deny Nabokov even the most basic knowledge of Aquinas, another more pressing question concerning Nabokov’s theological background arises: how does one explain Pale Fire’s stylistically and metaphysically Thomist statement while affirming his professed disinterest in theological matters and sources? This problem calls for a radical reconsideration of the place of theology in Pale Fire. Whichever is the case—that Nabokov erred or that he has played us for fools—the character and quality of Augustine and Aquinas’ subtextual presence in Pale Fire disavows obfuscating their distinctly theological role in expressing the analogy between literary and theological discourse at the heart of the novel’s mystery.
Given the novel’s penchant for anagrams and mirroring, both of which recur with profound metaphysical and metafictional implications throughout Nabokov’s fiction, it is meaningful that Kinbote mirrors Aquinas’ statements from the introduction to Question 3 in the prima pars, where Aquinas proceeds from a negative statement to a positive one. Presenting a mirror image of Aquinas’ statement, Kinbote begins with a positive statement and concludes with a negative one. To illustrate the point, Aquinas and Kinbote’s apophatic statements may be represented, respectively, thus:
We cannot know [negation] what God is [affirmation], but rather [we can know; affirmation] what He is not [negation].
One can know [affirmation] what God is not [negation]; one cannot know [negation] what He is [affirmation]. (C549)
Note that Kinbote’s quotation is an inverted image and so a mirror of the authentic, original Thomism. Just as Aquinas denies positive knowledge of God yet affirms negative knowledge of God (negation-affirmation, affirmation-negation), Kinbote, too, in reverse order, affirms only the possibility of negative knowledge of God and denies a corresponding positive knowledge (affirmation-negation, negation-affirmation). In marked contrast, Augustine breaks the pattern in On the Trinity, asserting that positive and negative knowledge of God are possible (affirmation-affirmation, affirmation-negation):
Before we can know [affirmation] what God is [affirmation], we can already know [affirmation] what He is not [negation].[10]
Considering, moreover, that the difference between the letters g and q is primarily a matter of the direction of the flourished serif, without which the letters might in some scripts be indistinguishable, Augustine’s Latin name (Augustinus) might be read as containing an imperfect anagram forming Aguinus (Aquinas). Yet even if the potential anagram is considered untenable, the problem of confused identities remains among the novel’s most prominent themes. This is most clearly seen in the ‘mirror maker of genius’ (Index) St Sudarg of Bokay, whose name is a near-perfect mirror image of the assassin Jakob Gradus, who has travelled from Zembla to Appalachia in search of Zembla’s deposed and disguised king, Charles Xavier, who has adopted the alias Charles Kinbote, whose surname means in Zemblan ‘a king’s destroyer’ (C894), a regicide, Gradus made even stranger, as he is refracted and redoubled in Charles’ grandfathers’ ‘cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay’ (C80), Gradus’ other double.
In this regard—though without getting into the structural debates surrounding the significance of the Latin word gradus (lit. degree, step) to the novel’s internal author problem, which is tangential to this article’s immediate purpose of distinguishing the origins and significance of Kinbote’s apophaticism in his note to line 549—it is worth noting Alexey Sklyarenko’s observation, that the presence of gradus (the surname of the regicide and Shade’s inadvertent killer, Jakob Gradus) in the original Latin from De Trinitate 8.2.3 would be of great thematic and structural significance to Pale Fire.[11] Though his line of argument is obscure at times, Sklyarenko seems to assert that, if the ‘step’ in Augustine’s statement (‘For when we aspire from this depth to that height, it is a step towards no small knowledge, if, before we can know what God is, we can already know what He is’) is a translation of gradus, then Kinbote’s appeal to Augustine ultimately obfuscates the theological terroir of Augustine’s statement and instead gestures to some paronomastic game being played with regard to the real identity of the author inside Nabokov’s novel. Sklyarenko’s suggestion fails, however, since Augustine’s ‘step’ comes from pars, not gradus.[12] Nevertheless, contra Sklyarenko, the absence of gradus from Augustine’s original Latin remains significant, since its absence attests to the distinctly negative significance of Kinbote’s use of Augustinian language (though, really, Thomist syntax). Whatever end Augustine’s trinitarian treatise (whether in Latin or in translation) serves the novel, it is emphatically not to plant a clue for some lucky polyglot or for any other paronomastic purpose related to the novel’s debates concerning its structure or internal author. This disavows reducing the presence of these theological voices to mere textual artefacts in service of a metaliterary game without any substantial theological concern. Augustine’s voice in Pale Fire, to which Aquinas’ hushed whisper must surely be added, is distinctly and inarguably theological. Sklyarenko’s suggestion is therefore a false bottom, a warning against letting one’s referential mania off the lead and from extrapolating too wildly from the novel’s numerous false clues.
Even as Kinbote’s purported quotation of Augustine is best conceived as a work of misdirection intended to conceal a direct if also cryptic appeal to Aquinas’ Summa, it must be recognised that the whole of Kinbote’s monologue proceeding from his purported quotation of Augustine is of Augustinian provenance. Indeed, Augustine’s affirmations concerning what cannot be positively said or known about God have exercised a profound influence on Kinbote’s apophaticism. Thus, immediately upon the heels of his assertion that ‘before we can know what God is, we can already know what He is not’, Augustine writes,
For certainly He is neither earth nor heaven; nor, as it were, earth and heaven nor any such thing as we see in the heaven; nor any such things as we do not see, but which perhaps is in heaven. Neither if you were to magnify in the imagination of your thought the light of the sun as much as you are able, either that it may be greater, or that it may be brighter, a thousand times as much, or times without number; neither is this God.[13]
The emphasis of Augustine’s claim is ontological: whatever God is, God cannot be identified with any tangible or imaginable thing (res). God is not one thing among others. ‘If you can grasp it, it isn’t God’, Augustine says in Sermon 117.[14] Kinbote writes similarly: ‘I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one’s rattling throat, not the black hum in one’s ears fading to nothing in nothing’ (C549). Though Kinbote (against Augustine) affirms that God is not nothing, Kinbote does not endorse the obverse conclusion, that God is one thing among others. Kinbote rather asserts that God transcends the category of existence itself. God is neither existent nor non-existent and therefore any attempt to apply the category of existence to God univocally is a category mistake. Moreover, Kinbote affirms that the being of God concerns a positive valuation of human flourishing: ‘He is not despair, He is not terror’ (C549). Kinbote also refuses to identify God with some abysmal nihil, Shade’s ‘le grand néant’ (P618). And even as Kinbote speaks of ‘an inviting abyss’ into which he imagines dissolving in death, his abyss stands in stark contradistinction to Shade’s great nothingness, for Kinbote evokes his abyss within the context of his ‘burning desire for merging in God’ (C493).
Kinbote then affirms ‘Mind’ as a fitting analogy to whatever God is, from which he concludes that God is creator par excellence:
I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority. (C549)
The primacy of the mind is a staple of Augustine’s theology and of the Augustinian theological tradition throughout the centuries. Indeed, Augustine calls the mind ‘the central zone of my salvation’ in Confessions, and in On the Trinity, he expounds at length how the mind may be understood as the preeminent natural analogue for the Trinity, ‘for it is His image in this very point, that it is capable of Him, and can be partaker of Him; which so great good is only made possible by its being His image’.[15]
Augustine’s On the Trinity is a monumental work in the history of theology. ‘Trinitarian theology in the West’, observes Rik van Nieuwenhove, ‘is but a footnote to Augustine’s seminal work’.[16] Aquinas is certainly no exception in this regard. ‘Aquinas is anxious’, writes Étienne Gilson,
to make it clear that even though their philosophical languages may differ ever so widely, when it comes to matters of faith he has nothing to say which has not been said already by Augustine or, at least, could not be said by him now.[17]
The articulation of divine simplicity and the apophaticism that it summons and which one finds in Augustine’s On the Trinity is ‘central to the conception of God we find in St. Thomas’, notes Gareth Matthews. Indeed, Aquinas ‘buttresses his appeal to this idea by appeal to the authority of Augustine’, as may be seen in his explicit recourse to Augustine’s work in his articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in Questions 27 through 43 in the prima pars.[18] Thus, in Objection 2 to Article 1 of Question 32 in the prima pars (‘Whether the trinity of the divine persons can be known by natural reason?’), Aquinas avers: ‘Augustine proceeds (De Trin. x, 4; x, 11, 12) to prove the trinity of persons by the procession of the word and of love in our own mind; and we have followed him in this’ at Articles 1 and 3 of Question 27 in the prima pars, respectively, ‘Whether there is procession in God?’ and ‘Whether any other procession exists in God besides that of the Word?’.
In the fifth of his ‘five ways’ for proving the existence of God (the so-called teleological argument), Aquinas, similar to Augustine in this respect, sees reflected in ‘the governance of the world’ the workings of a transcendent mind:
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.[19]
Kinbote’s assertion of the primacy of ‘Mind’ (quoted above) is essentially similar in kind, as may be seen in Kinbote and Aquinas’ shared denial that the world came about ‘fortuitously’, but by an ‘intelligence’ or ‘Mind’ most appropriately albeit roughly called ‘God’.[20] Moreover, just as Aquinas at the end of each of his ‘five ways’[21] and Kinbote at the conclusion of his note to line 549 assert the authority of the name of ‘God’, it is imperative to recognise that Kinbote also follows Aquinas in his conviction that the task of divine naming, and the name of ‘God’ in particular, is predicated upon the discernment of providence:
With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. (C549)
So, too, in the responsio to Question 8 of Article 13 in the prima pars, Aquinas declares:
Hence this name God is a name of operation in so far as relates to the source of its meaning. For this name is imposed from His universal providence over all things; since all who speak of God intend to name God as exercising providence over all; hence Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ii), ‘The Deity watches over all with perfect providence and goodness’. But taken from this operation, this name God is imposed to signify the divine nature.
In a rather simplistic sense, then, for Kinbote and his theological interlocutors, ‘God’ names that which is responsible for providence, that which we can blame for the existence of existence, as it were, just as ‘Author’ names that which is responsible for literary structures, that which we can blame for literature, yet which remains in-exhausted and unexplained by the structures, words and total combination of each aspect of the literary artefact.[22] What lies beyond this, as Christian metaphysics and literary criticism tell us, cannot be known. Neither title communicates anything about what either is—only their operation, that for which we might venerate or berate them.
From the perspective of style, what is perhaps the most intriguing feature of Kinbote’s oscillations between Augustine and Aquinas also occurs in the same Question of the Summa whence Kinbote receives his pseudo-quotation—‘Whether God is altogether simple?’, to which Aquinas responds, ‘Augustine says De Trin. [vi], 6,7) “God is truly and absolutely simple”’.[23] Augustine’s words as written will be found neither in the original Latin nor in any translation of On the Trinity, however, since the quotation is rather a compressed summary of Augustine’s argument in On the Trinity 6.6.8, which considers how God is a ‘substance both simple and manifold’.[24] Just as Kinbote only appears to quote Augustine, Aquinas (in the same Question where he states, ‘we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not’) claims to quote Augustine when, in fact, he is merely paraphrasing Augustine’s argument at 6.6.8, that even though God is rightly called a great variety of things,
His greatness is the same as His wisdom . . . His goodness is the same as His wisdom and greatness, and His truth the same as all those things; and in Him it is not one thing to be blessed, and another to be great, or wise, or true, or good, or in a word to be Himself.
Adhering closely to Augustine’s argument, Thomas states immediately upon the heels of his invented quotation,
For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His suppositum; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple.[25]
The way that Aquinas fabricates a quotation from Augustine’s On the Trinity to articulate the notion of divine simplicity corresponds to and intensifies the difficulty of distinguishing between Augustine and Aquinas in Kinbote’s note to line 549, where Kinbote also falsely quotes Augustine. Indeed, Kinbote’s false quotation is in fact a clever mirror by which he non-identically repeats the founding premise of Aquinas’ theology, just as Aquinas invents a quotation by Augustine to justify his contribution to the Augustinian notion of divine simplicity.
Read in the refracting light of Pale Fire, this problem of confused sources and invented quotations forces readers to consider the following question: If one were to say, ‘God is truly and absolutely simple’, would one be quoting Augustine or Aquinas? As Augustine never wrote it, one is hard pressed to say that one is quoting Augustine. On the other hand, Aquinas is unlikely to accept final authorship of the statement since he is paraphrasing Augustine in defence of his argument. Indeed, it is likely that the theological tradition proceeding from Aquinas would affirm Augustinian provenance, even if Augustine never wrote the phrase, since Aquinas is acting as a steward of this crucial aspect of the Augustinian tradition. To use Wood’s distinction, Augustine the historical person may have never written it, of course, but for Aquinas and the church after him, the phrase bears the signature of Augustine the author. The saint still speaks; the author is other than dead. Of course, this is not to ultimately distinguish between Augustine and Aquinas in Kinbote’s conclusion to his note to line 549, since it rather seems that their voices have truly merged by the time Kinbote utters the appellative ‘God’. However mundane the theological discussion between Kinbote and Shade may seem, the playfulness with which Pale Fire engages key selections from Augustine’s On the Trinity and Aquinas’ Summa illuminates its fundamental concern with the dualisms of authorship and redaction and origin and variation as well as the competing ontologies which, on the one hand, would construe Kinbote and Aquinas as dubious commentators of purloined texts—Timonian moons whose ‘pale fire’ they have ‘snatched from the sun[s]’ of Shade and Augustine—or, on the other hand, as gifted participants in a living tradition whose meaning, as Gennady Barabtarlo put it in a wonderful essay on the movement of Nabokov’s themes, ‘is of a kind that closes, yet “does not terminate”’.[26]
III. NABOKOVIAN THEOLOGY: THE APOPHASIS OF ‘GOD’
Kinbote is certainly not the only one of Nabokov’s characters to attempt to speak of what is ineffable, nor does he set himself an impossible task by doing so, since he makes no attempt to peer into the divine essence. Kinbote’s reliance on Augustine and Aquinas rather prevents him from doing so. And while Augustine’s claim that one can know ‘what God is’ only after having discerned ‘what God is not’ might seem to contradict Aquinas’ conviction that one cannot know God’s suppositum (the unique, unrepeatable and absolutely unknowable divine essence), Augustine takes for granted that all positive knowledge of God is, as with Aquinas, merely appellative. From this perspective, Kinbote’s conviction that ‘one can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is’ (C549) betrays the ‘meta’ at the heart of Christian metaphysics, which is to say, after Erich Przywara, that the apophatic element in Augustine and Aquinas—and, indeed, in Pale Fire—is summed up in the certainty that ‘what is ultimate in “what God is” is “what God is not”’.[27] Therefore, to judge Kinbote as having embarked on an impossible task misunderstands that Augustine and Aquinas agree and that Kinbote’s synthesis of the two theologians underwrites his act of divine naming.
At issue here, then, is what might be called first steps in theology, since the first undeniable truth of God is that knowledge of ‘what God is’ comes only after realising that it is unattainable. ‘Reason’, Denys Turner writes, ‘gets you to where unnameable mystery begins, but stands on this side of it, gesturing towards what it cannot know, and there is “kenotically” self-emptied . . . stunned into silence at the shock of its final defeat’.[28] So, too, Karl Barth declares that even as ‘theology means rational wrestling with the mystery’, such wrestling must ‘lead only to fresh and authentic interpretation and manifestation as a mystery’ (emphasis added).[29] And insofar as theology is a science, Nabokov’s simple math—‘the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don’t believe that any science today has pierced any mystery’—carries a metaphysical weight equal to Kinbote’s apophaticism.[30] Nabokov makes this statement in the same interview where he professes ‘utter indifference to organized mysticism, to religion, to the church—any church’.[31] Nabokov also concludes this interview with a question which continues to baffle critics:
Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill—I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.[32]
This rather enigmatic statement suggests that the playful apophaticism with which Kinbote seeks to name God corresponds not to Nabokov’s agnosticism, but his apophaticism. In this respect, it is important to observe that though Kinbote’s poetic theologising owes much to Augustine and Aquinas’ apophaticism, the beautiful gloss he offers on ‘God’s Presence—a faint phosphoresce at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it’ (C549) bears the distinct mark of Nabokov’s style and exposes, however partially, something which can only be hazily described as the theological contours expressed in the sustained literary performance called ‘Nabokov’.[33]
David Rutledge is therefore incorrect in his evaluation that ‘Kinbote is misguided by his belief that the metaphysical sense (Universal Mind, Nature, God) can be so easily named’, not to mention his claim that ‘“the Name of God”, of course, does not even have priority in his own sentence’, since, of course, it does.[34] As has been shown, Kinbote is under no delusion that the appellative ‘God’ communicates anything about ‘what God is’ or ‘what God is not’. It is a mere title, a verbal sign whose sense exceeds comprehension, indeed, a monosyllable signifying its self-conscious awareness that it hardly signifies and thus its truly uncanny power to signify. Nevertheless, even as Rutledge is rather insistent upon the absolute ineffability of the metaphysical sense in Nabokov’s work, Rutledge is correct to perceive in Pale Fire ‘a hierarchy of consciousness—and of aesthetic appreciation’ leading to Nabokov and which then ‘suggests an even higher, less easily labelled level above the real author’.[35]
Though this is a compelling reading, Rutledge neglects to see through his project’s organisation around a sense of ‘hierarchy that leads toward a sense of perfection that is beyond the visible structure, beyond the book’ and which is ‘the ideal method for accurately conveying [Nabokov’s] metaphysical sense’.[36] Rutledge neither examines the notion of hierarchy in the history of thought nor mentions the etymological origins of ‘hierarchy’ in the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Instead, Rutledge presumes a sense of hierarchy tending towards a stoic agnosticism which, contra Kinbote and the theological voices surveyed in this article, repudiates any attempt to name or vaguely signify the final referent of Pale Fire’s fictive cosmos or an otherwise ‘Nabokovian’ metaphysics. As a consequence, Rutledge fails to appreciate the fact that ‘the notion of absolute ineffability is not only incoherent but also useless’, as Timothy Knepper demonstrates in his study of apophasis in the Dionysian corpus. Ineffable things are not things, and if they are indeed things, then they are not ineffable, however nearly so. ‘Ineffability, rather, is always relative’, continues Knepper, ‘some particular “thing” that cannot be spoken in some particular respect for some particular reason toward some particular end’.[37] Attending to the expression of metaphysics in Nabokov’s work according to a hierarchical metapoetics tends instead towards a mise-en-abîme—a perpetual saying, unsaying and un-unsaying of what Kinbote is content to call ‘God’, not because the word communicates anything positive about the divine essence, but because it is the most abyssal of words, telling us nothing else than that, whatever it is,
there is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. . . . It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.[38]
So long as readers continue to misunderstand and ultimately undervalue Kinbote’s robust refusal of a positive theological grammar, they will fail to perceive the metaliterary analogy which underwrites the distinctly Nabokovian style of Kinbote’s apophaticism. Indeed, if there is any analogy between Kinbote’s forceful refusal to identify God with any thing, real or imagined, and the reader’s quest for the novel’s internal author(s), then it is a kind of playful epektasis, an ever-deepening movement into the ever-receding depths of the novel’s infinity mirror, where every reflection is but kin and shade of that whose image it plays in ten thousand places. Hence, one finds not only that the task of interpretation is inexhaustible, but that the notion of an internal author within the novel’s receding worlds is as spurious as the idea of locating God in the machine. The name Author has priority. We cannot know who the Author is, only who the Author is not.
IV. CONCLUSION
It is highly improbable that Nabokov should have approached even one of these most influential philosophical-theological works with a view towards their style without already having some familiarity with their theological content. However Nabokov arrived at these two texts, that the selected sections of each text are concerned with the very same issue—conceiving and speaking of God—suggests that Nabokov found in these theologians allies in Pale Fire’s game of authorial hide-and-seek and its corresponding theological expression in Kinbote’s note to line 549.[39]
Kinbote is not Nabokov, of course, but the popular image of Kinbote, that he is stylistically inept and that his theological musings are irrelevant to constructive interpretation of Pale Fire, is specious, especially as it is the distinctly Nabokovian style of Kinbote’s theological play that most clearly attests to the enduring if critically surprising significance of theology to the novel’s metaphysics and poetics. Indeed, Kinbote is at his most lucid and sober-minded, and his textual performance is most Nabokovian precisely in his attempts to imagine the unimaginable. Robert Alter’s assertion that Kinbote and Nabokov ‘come together in [Kinbote’s] declaration of faith’ must therefore be extended beyond Kinbote’s denial that God is to be identified with despair, terror, darkness and nothingness and his affirmation of the necessity of mind in the world’s occurrence, to include Kinbote’s entire statement, from his opening pastiche of Augustine and Aquinas to his affirmation of the supremacy of the appellative ‘God’, both of which Alter excludes.[40] Barring Kinbote’s positive valuation of ‘the church’ (C549) as the best training ground for the apophatic imagination, how one values Kinbote’s apophaticism bears considerable weight upon how one makes sense of Pale Fire’s real concern with the topoi of religion, mysticism and theology.[41]
What sense may then be made of Nabokov’s intentions, if such an inquiry can responsibly be made? It seems that the selection of Kinbote’s note to line 549 of Shade’s poem which is the focus of this article is undoubtedly an instance of Nabokovian misdirection or deception. In this case, such deception takes form as a violation of the reading contract. According to Michael Rodgers, Nabokov often works to disempower his readers by violating the reading contract, which Rodgers glosses as the presumed desire ‘on the part of the writer that the reader should ultimately understand the text . . . that the reader knows of this expectation in the writer that the writer knows that the readers know, and so on’.[42] Nabokov often violates the reading contract to maintain his carefully crafted authorial persona as the paragon of artistic originality. Meyer, for example, demonstrates that in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Nabokov makes ‘abundant use of themes, images, and structures drawn from’ the work of Virginia Woolf, which ‘he appears not to have intended . . . to be detected’.[43] In addition to revealing a blatant sexism according to which women cannot help but write sentimental literature, Nabokov’s obfuscation of a prominent source betrays his habit of ‘taking something from a great author and then saying he’d never read him’, as Nina Berberova put it.[44]
Kinbote’s purported quotation of the literarily uncontroversial Augustine operates according to a similar mode of authorial deceit. In contrast to Aquinas and his theological system, Augustine’s literary genius is far more amenable towards maintaining an authorial identity of indifference to theology. By concealing Aquinas’ subtextual presence behind a theologically faithful Augustinian assertion of faith, Nabokov remains free to ‘take something from a great author’, while maintaining his position towards religion and theology as one of ‘utter indifference’.[45] This is accomplished with particular ease because Kinbote’s ‘lunatic twitching’, in Samuel Schuman’s apt phrase, prevents readers (rightly) from confusing him for Nabokov, no matter how much he might be ‘in many ways a ludicrous parody of Nabokov himself’.[46] Nevertheless, as this article demonstrates, there are significant ways in which Kinbote’s parody of his author reveals a peculiar theological affinity.
Yet because Shade’s sober bookishness remains so convincing, his exasperated lament, ‘Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?’ (C549), slips the reader into a kind of critical boredom or inattention which allows Nabokov to hide the Angelic Doctor in plain sight. And with a whisper Nabokov speaks those same words which mock Gospodin Sineusov and the frustrated reader of ‘Ultima Thule’ (Rus. 1942/1971) as they search for proof that Adam Falter has indeed come to know the secret of the cosmos: ‘Luckily, though, you paid no attention.’[47]
Erik Eklund is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham and Graduate Fellow with the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought. His doctoral thesis, A Triptych of Bottomless Light: Repetition, Originality and Transcendence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, charts the theological contours of the dialectic of repetition and identity in Nabokov’s 1962 masterpiece. His earlier work on eschatology and theurgy in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), in conversation with the thought of Nicolas Berdyaev, earned him the inaugural Dieter E. Zimmer Prize for Best Postgraduate Work from the International Vladimir Nabokov Society. He holds a dual appointment in the Department of English and College of Ministry at Northwest University, and his peer-reviewed articles appear in Journal of Inklings Studies, Literature and Theology, Nabokov Online Journal, Nabokov Studies, The Nabokovian, Partial Answers (forthcoming), Religion and the Arts (forthcoming), and Religion & Literature (forthcoming).
Image: Peter Paul Reubens, St. Augustine 1836-38
[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 2011), 33.
[2] Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 22, identifies four such Nabokovs: ‘1) the historical person’; ‘2) a set (also historical) of attitudes, prejudices, habits . . . having almost nothing to do with the writing’; ‘3) a (real) person I guess at but who keeps himself pretty well hidden . . . the obverse of the haughty public presence . . . the textual revenant rather than the one on the dust jacket’; and the author as intended here.
[3] See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 218, 234; Maxim D. Shrayer, The World of Nabokov’s Stories (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 26. While the various Nabokovs do converge at significant points, Wood’s distinction is valuable, since in the realm of religion (broadly conceived) as in politics, the ‘utter indifference’ which Nabokov the historical person held towards both is obversely matched in the profound interest which his art has in both. ‘I suppose that my indifference to religion is of the same nature as my dislike of group activities in the domain of political or civic commitments’, Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 40. Against Nabokov’s frequent expressions of disinterest and indifference towards politics, Dana Dragunoiu, Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Liberalism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 223, 226, persuasively reveals that ‘his fiction had been irrevocably shaped by political circumstances . . . Nabokov’s self-styled “supreme indifference” to politics . . . is a version of the Kadet Party’s official commitment to remain “above politics” for the sake of promoting a universal commitment to law independent of class or party interests’.
[4] Sergei Davydov, ‘Faith’, in Vladimir Nabokov in Context, eds. David M. Bethea and Siggy Frank, 219–27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 221. See Christopher A. Link, ‘Recourse to Eden: Tracing the Roots of Nabokov’s Adamic Themes’, Nabokov Studies 12 (2009/2011): 63–127; Samuel Schuman, ‘Beautiful Gate: Vladimir Nabokov and Orthodox Iconography’, Religion & Literature 32, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 47–66; Samuel Schuman, ‘Nabokov’s God; God’s Nabokov’, in Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, eds. Michael Rodgers and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 73–86 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Gavriel Shapiro, Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 71–124.
[5] Priscilla Meyer, Nabokov and Indeterminacy: The Case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 16–17. Vivian Darkbloom is one of Nabokov’s many anagrammatic noms de plume.
[6] Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, in Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962, ed. Brian Boyd, 437–667 (New York: The Library of America, 1996), C549. All citations from Pale Fire are given in abbreviated form in the main text, where C=Commentary, F=Foreword, I=Index and P=Poem.
[7] According to Priscilla Meyer, Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 78–79, the ‘young minister’ whom Kinbote saw as a boy in the Rose Court at the back of the Onhava Ducal Chapel is an allusion to Augustine’s garden conversion, recorded in book eight of Confessions. Kinbote writes: ‘Guilty disgust contorted his thin lips. . . . His clenched hands seemed to be gripping invisible prison bars. But there is no bound to the measure of grace which man may be able to receive. All at once his look changed to one of rapture and reverence. I had never seen such a blaze of bliss before but was to perceive something of that splendor, of that spiritual energy and divine vision’ (C47–48).
[8] Augustine, On the Trinity, 8.2.3, trans. Arthur West Haddan, in Phillip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1887).
[9] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter ST), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, ed. Benzinger Bros (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1947).
[10] Augustine, On the Trinity, 8.2.3.
[11] Alexey Sklyarenko, ‘more competent Gradus, St. Augustine & psychopompos in Pale Fire’, NABOKV-L posting, 12 October 2017, ¶31; retrieved from https://thenabokovian.org/index.php/node/1345.
[12] ‘Non enim paruae notitiae pars [step] est cum de profundo isto in illam summitatem respiramus si antequam scire possimus quid sit deus, possumus iam scire quid non sit’; retrieved from https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/augustine/trin8.shtml. Given Nabokov’s knowledge of French, as well as Jakob Gradus’ alias, ‘Degré’ (C286), it is worth pointing out that degré does not occur in the French translation of Augustine’s text. Where Sklyarenko hopes to find degré, one finds partie in its place. See Augustine, De la Trinité, trans. M. l’abbé Duchassaing and M. Devoille (Bar-le-duc, 1868); retrieved from https://www.bibliotheque-monastique.ch/bibliotheque/bibliotheque/saints/augustin/trinite/livre8.htm#_Toc512790300. Augustine, Confessions, 9.10.24, 10.8.12, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014–2016), uses variant forms of gradus when speaking of ascent to the invisible God.
[13] Augustine, On the Trinity, 8.2.3.
[14] Augustine, Sermon 117, 5 in Sermons, vol. 4, trans. Edmund Hill, ed. John E. Rotelle (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1992),.
[15] Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11; Augustine, On the Trinity, 14.8.11.
[16] Rik van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 19.
[17] Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960), vii.
[18] Gareth B. Matthews, introduction to On the Trinity, Books 8–15, by Augustine, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna, ix–xxix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxvii.
[19] ST 1a.2.3.responsio. Aquinas cites from Augustine’s Enchiridion in his reply to objection one.
[20] Writing at the same time as Aquinas and embracing more strongly Augustine’s Neoplatonism, Bonaventure, Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum, 1:3, 2, 2, 1, in Opera Omnia, 8 vols., ed. Fathers of the Collegium S. Bonaventure (Quaracchi Ad Claras Aquas: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1882–1962), 1:89, claims that among the four primary meanings of ‘mind’ is ‘mênê, which is the “moon” or “pale light”’ [luna sive defectus]. According to Regis J. Armstrong (ed. and trans.), Into God: Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of Saint Bonaventure: An Annotated Translation (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2020), 154, the phases (transmutationes) of the moon correspond, for Bonaventure, to the mind’s ‘waxing and waning’ (see also 153-55). Thus, the mind, considered according to Bonaventure’s etymology and the Augustinian ontology of the mind he inherits, is a mirror in the same way that the moon is a mirror of the sun: its light is not its own, but another’s. Indeed, Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 3.3.11–12, in Armstrong (trans.), Into God, 1–147, suggests that it is in the mirror of the mind—‘a pale light in the dimness of bodily life’, in Kinbote’s phrase (C549)—that we most clearly perceive, ‘as in a mirror, dimly’ (1 Cor. 13.12), a watermark of the Trinity: ‘But since that mind of ours itself is changeable, it cannot see such a [truth] shining unchangeably except by means of some light radiating in a thoroughly unchangeable way, which is impossible for a changeable creature. [Understanding] knows, therefore, in that Light which enlightens every human being coming into this world: the true Light and the Word who was in the beginning with God’ (brackets and italics original).
[21] ‘And this everyone understands to be God . . . to which everyone gives the name of God . . . this all men speak of as God . . . and this we call God . . . and this being we call God’, ST 1a.2.3.responsio.
[22] ‘Asked who God is, Israel’s answer is, “Whoever rescued us from Egypt”’, Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44. ‘This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name’, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 1997), 206, emphasis added; retrieved from http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc.htm.
[23] ST 1a.3.7.sed contra.
[24] Matthews, introduction to On the Trinity, by Augustine, xxvii.
[25] ST 1a.3.7.responsio. Suppositum signifies ‘what can be said to “have” a nature of this or that kind . . . It provides the answer to the question of which individual of a certain nature is in question’, Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 15.
[26] William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4.3.437–38 ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Gennady Barabtarlo, ‘Nabokov’s Trinity: On the movement of Nabokov’s themes’, in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, ed. Julian W. Connolly, 109–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 136.
[27] Erich Przywara, in Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 531.
[28] Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121.
[29] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1.1, §9.2, The Doctrine of the Word of God, 2nd ed., ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley (London: T&T Clark, 2009).
[30] Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 38.
[31] Ibid., 33.
[32] Ibid, 38.
[33] For a detailed analysis of the ways that Nabokov refracts aspects of himself in Kinbote, with special attention, also, to Bend Sinister (1947) and The Gift (Rus. 1938/1963), see Erik Eklund, ‘The Gist of Masks: Notes on Kinbote’s Christianity and Nabokov’s Authorial Kenosis’, Nabokov Online Journal 15 (2021): 1–29, 18–25. See also Zoran Kuzmanovich, ‘“Just as it was, or perhaps a little more perfect”: Notes on Nabokov’s Sources’, Nabokov Studies 7 (2002/2003): 13–32.
[34] David S. Rutledge, Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011), 7.
[35] Ibid., 173.
[36] Ibid., 14.
[37] Timothy D. Knepper, Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), xiv; see also 61–68, 131.
[38] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology, 5, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. Paul Rorem, trans. Colm Luibheid, 133–41 (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987).
[39] Though Gennadi Barabtarlo, Phantom of Fact: A Guide to Nabokov’s Pnin (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1989), 166, demonstrates that Nabokov receives his image of St. Bartholomew in Pnin from Sabine Baring-Gould, The Lives of the Saints, 16 vols., rev. ed. (London: Nimmo, 1898), the text does not seem to have provided Nabokov with any pertinent information related to Augustine and Aquinas in Pale Fire. Neither Aquinas’ statement from ST 1a.3.intro nor any variation of Kinbote’s purported quotation of Augustine appear throughout its sixteen volumes. Matthew Roth, ‘THOUGHTS: Pnin, St. Bart, Baring-Gould’, NABOKV-L posting, 27 June 2013, §1, has corroborated Barabtarlo’s find.
[40] Robert Alter, Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 100. Pace Victor Fet, ‘Zoological Nomenclature and Kinbote’s Name of God’, The Nabokovian 53 (Fall 2004): 49–52, whose primary fault lies in determining the metaphysical priority of each ‘name’ in Kinbote’s list according to the zoological ‘Law of Priority’ set forth in Regles Internationales de la Nomenclature Zoologique, whose Russian translation (1911), Nabokov knew well.
[41] Kinbote’s comment, ‘I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable’, recalls C.S. Lewis’ assertion in Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1948), 183: ‘The task of the imagination here is not to forecast it but simply, by brooding on many possibilities, to make room for a more complete and circumspect agnosticism . . . It is useful not because we can trust these fancies to give us any positive truths about the New Creation but because they teach us not to limit, in our rashness, the vigour and variety of the new crops which this old field might yet produce.’ Similarities aside, there is nothing to indicate that Nabokov had any knowledge of Lewis.
[42] Michael Rodgers, Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 82–3.
[43] Meyer, Nabokov and Indeterminacy, 56.
[44] Nina Berberova, ‘Nabokov in the Thirties’, TriQuarterly 17 (1970): 220–33, 226, quoted in ibid., 56. In a letter to Edmund Wilson dated 5 May 1950, in Simon Karlinsky (ed.), The Nabokov-Wilson Letters 1940–1971 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 241, Nabokov famously remarked: ‘I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class.’ Another revealing example may be found in Nabokov’s 1968 foreword to the English translation of his 1928 novel King, Queen, Knave, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage, 1989), viii, where he falsely claims that in the late 1920s, ‘I spoke no German, had no German friends, had not read a single German novel either in the original, or in translation’. According to Rodgers, Nabokov and Nietzsche, 15, Nabokov intends his deceit to rid him of any ‘possible “guilt by association” with fascism in the anglophone world’. See also Boyd, Russian Years, 77; John Burt Foster, Jr., ‘Transnational Authorship on the German-Slavic Border: The Examples of Nietzsche and Nabokov’, in Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia, ed. Gennady Barabtarlo, 212–24 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 212–13; Omry Ronen, ‘Nabokov and Goethe’, Cold Fusion, 241–51, 247.
[45] Berberova, ‘Nabokov in the Thirties’, 226, quoted in Meyer, Nabokov and Indeterminacy, 56; Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 33
[46] Schuman, ‘Beautiful Gate’, 53.
[47] Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Ultima Thule’, in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Dmitri Nabokov, 500–22 (New York: Vintage, 2008), 522.