a Russian writer', he recalled. 'I had the feeling that Cambridge and all its famed features - venerable elms, blazoned windows, loquacious tower clocks - were of no consequence in themselves but existed merely to frame and support my rich nostalgia.'54
The focus of Nabokov's longing for Russia was the family estate at Vyra, near St Petersburg. It contained his childhood memories. In Speak, Memory he claimed to have felt his first pangs of nostalgia at the tender age of five, when, on holiday in Europe, 'I would draw with my forefinger on my pillow the carriage road sweeping up to our Vyra house.'55 The pain of losing Vyra was acute - perhaps more acute than the loss of much of the family wealth or the loss of his homeland, which Nabokov hardly knew, apart from Vyra and St Petersburg. In Speak, Memory he emphasizes the point.
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.
My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who 'hates the Reds' because they 'stole' his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.
And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:
… Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia.
The general reader may now resume.56
From the gloom of Cambridge - where the porridge at breakfast in Trinity College was 'as grey and dull as the sky above Great Court' -he wrote to his mother, who had settled in Berlin, in October 1920:
Mother, dear, yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and asked someone - I don't know whom - the night, the stars, God: will I really never return, is it really all finished, wiped out, destroyed? Mother, we must return, mustn't we, it cannot be that all this has died, turned to dust - such an idea could drive one mad. I would like to describe every little bush, every stalk in our
divine park at Vyra - but no one can understand this. How little we valued our paradise! - we should have loved it more pointedly, more consciously.57
This nostalgia for Vyra was the inspiration for Speak, Memory, in which he lovingly describes its 'every little bush' in an effort to recover his childhood memories and desires. It was a sort of Proustian discourse on the sinuosity of time and consciousness. Nabokov's 'memory' was a creative act, a reanimation of the past which blended with the present through association, and was then transfigured into personality and art. He once wrote that the exile has a sharper sense of time. His extraordinary capacity to re-create through words the sensations of the past was surely his own exile's dividend.
Exile is a leitmotif throughout Nabokov's works. Mary, his first novel, published in Berlin in 1926, was intended as a portrait of the emigre condition, even if Nabokov, in his introduction to the English version in 1970, stressed its autobiographical nature. Ganin, the hero, in yearning for Mary, becomes an emblem of the exile's dream: the hope of retrieving and reliving the lost happiness of his youth in Russia. In Glory (1932) the hero, Martin Edelweiss, a Russian emigre from the Crimea who is studying at Cambridge University, dreams of returning to Russia. His fantasies take shape as he travels to Berlin and ventures through the woods to cross the Russian border, never to return. The subject of The Gift (1938) is equally the 'gloom and glory of exile'.58 It is the theme of all Nabokov's Russian-language novels (of which there are nine). Their tragic characters are emigres, lost and isolated in a foreign world or haunted by a past which is irretrievable except through the creative memory of fantasy or art. In The Gift its hero, the writer Fedor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, re-creates the literary life of Russia through his poetry. In Glory and Pale Fire (written in English in 1962) the hero lives in a dreamworld Russia to escape the misery of his exile. Nabokov's thoughts about the 'distant Northern land' he called Zembla in Pale Fire reveal the writer's response to exile:
1. The image of Zembla must creep up on the reader very gradually… 4. Nobody knows, nobody should know - even Kinbote hardly knows - if Zembla really exists.
5. Zembla and its characters should remain in a fluid misty condition…
6. We do not even know whether Zembla is pure invention or a kind of lyrical simile of Russia (Zembla: Zemlya [the Russian word for 'land']).59
