When Nabokov’s novels did break through to European readers, the critics were sometimes outright hostile. Sartre’s review of
The position in prewar European culture of another émigré, Igor Stravinsky, was somewhat different. Nabokov was still a little-known writer, while Stravinsky was a recognized master of the European musical avant-garde. But even Stravinsky had difficulties in those years in France. After 1925 most of the commissions for new works, including two ballets
That is why the composer gratefully accepted an invitation from Harvard University and moved to the United States. Nabokov, who could not get permission to work in France, arrived in America in 1940. The war in Europe also influenced his decision. And Balanchine had moved to the United States even earlier, in 1933, at the invitation of a recent Harvard graduate, the young American aesthete and ballet connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein.
Neoclassical ideas had a powerful influence on Kirstein. In the twenties T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” became “code and guide” for him. In the late twenties and early thirties Kirstein also read the works of Andre Levinson, a Russian ballet reviewer in Paris, and later called him “the most erudite, perhaps the only contemporary critic of dancing.”135 Kirstein and his friends were thus prepared intellectually and aesthetically to transplant classical ballet to America in its most severe traditional form. Balanchine had no more illusions about his career in Europe; according to Kirstein, who met Balanchine in London, he was “intense, convinced, not desperate but without hope.”136 America held out that glimmer of hope.
In hindsight, we could suppose that the emigration from Russia of Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine, for all the differences in their backgrounds and ambitions, was no accident. Stravinsky left his homeland before the revolution, and it seems likely Nabokov and Balanchine would have chosen that same path even if the Bolsheviks had not come to power.
All three had been born in Petersburg and developed, independently of one another, a cosmopolitan aesthetics based on classical principles, but they gave those principles a modern twist. All three felt constrained within traditional Russian culture, which proclaimed the supremacy of content over form and demanded that art be actively involved in the social and civic ferment of the times.
To realize at least some of their creative concepts in an international setting was for all three a natural desire. The Russian Revolution had created new realities that made the emigration of Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine irreversible. As a result these three artists, along with others less prominent, created what I call the Petersburg branch of modernism abroad. These three were stifled in the nationalistic atmosphere of Europe between the wars. They imagined the United States as a safe refuge, free of European political labels and prejudices.
Stravinsky spent over thirty years and Balanchine almost fifty in America, and died in New York City; Nabokov’s “American period” lasted close to twenty. In those years Balanchine created a tradition of classical ballet that has become an American national possession; and Stravinsky and Nabokov powerfully influenced their American colleagues with their distinctive skills; the adjectives “Stravinskian” and “Nabokovian” became commonplace. All three became loyal American citizens, and, in fact, American artists. Nabokov even made the ultimate conversion: he stopped writing in Russian. Thus, their presence in America turned this branch of Petersburg modernism abroad into a specifically American version.
At the same time, the three planted a version of the Petersburg mythos in America in works oriented for American audiences that then traveled the world and, against all odds, returned to their native city, where their creators could not venture.
Teaching Russian literature in American universities, Nabokov tirelessly promoted Gogol, stressing the formal perfection and existential vision of his Petersburg works and pointing out the glaring deficiencies of the existing English translations. In the forties, Nabokov wrote a brilliant book about Gogol that remains the single best introduction to the genius of Petersburg for foreign readers.
