Nabokov and Decadence

Vladimir Nabokov’s early short story The Fight wasfirst published in September of 1925 within the Russian emigré newspaper Ru’l. This short text was grouped by the author in later life alongside other stories as a ‘bottom of the barrel’ text, deemed only just worthy of republication and translation by his son Dmitri Nabokov. The text now sits within theCollected Stories,a small snippet of early experimental prose, greatly overshadowed by the rest of Nabokov’s extensive oeuvre. And yet, in the last lines of this work lies an authorial interjection that provides an early glimpse of the aesthetic philosophy that would concern the Russian novelist throughout his later writings. Nabokov rejected didacticism alongside the suggestion that art should contain any moral sentiment, or even concern itself too sincerely with human emotion, which contributes to the idea that he sits within the long tradition of Aestheticism. The Aesthetic movement has its origins in the late nineteenth century, with Theophile Gautiers adoption of the phrase ‘l’art pour l’art’ becoming its manifesto. Nabokov’s personal artistic philosophy aligns with the idea that art should be autotelic, or in the words of Oscar Wilde (The Decay of Lying, 942) art ought never express ‘anything but itself’. However, Nabokov’s aestheticism is distinctive in its expressions of caricature, parody and anti-beauty, its concern with the immoral and the debauched. While Nabokov is rarely ever characterised as a decadent novelist, the late nineteenth century Decadence movement that overlapped into aestheticism concerned itself with these similar themes of immorality and transgression that appear throughout the Nabokovian canon. 

There are numerousthreads of thought that can be pursued when trying to grapple with Nabokov’s aesthetic philosophy. He remains so difficult to define or place within any artistic tradition due to his rejection of artistic comparison. He actively disliked the term ‘art for art sake’ believing its promoters- referring in particular to Oscar Wilde- were ‘in reality rank moralists and didacticists’ (Toffler, 6), and yet regardless of his own dislike of the purple prose of Oscar Wilde it would be impossible to separate his work entirely from any influence. The final lines of The Fight engage with the idea that art should concern itself with impressions; ‘the play of shadows and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way’ (146). These fleeting visual moments that Nabokov discusses relate to the aesthetic philosophy of Walter Pater in his ‘Conclusion to the Renaissance’. It might be argued that while Nabokov persistently almost satirically criticised and denied the influence of many of his literary predecessors on his work- ‘Gogol, Tolstoevski, Joyce, Voltaire, Sade, Stendhal, Balzac, Byron… (and) Charlie Chaplin’ (ITAB, forward,, 8) to name a few- those whose ideas he borrowed most freely from, he made point of seldom mentioning, Walter Pater being one of them. Paters ‘Conclusion to the Renaissance’ for many, is a manifesto for Aesthetic philosophy, paving the way for subsequent essays on the true purpose of Art, in particular Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray,which argued that ‘all art is quite useless’ (4). Pater asserted that life is assembled from fleeting impressions ‘unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them’ (5), for both Pater and Nabokov, the artists only intention should be to recapture and produce impressions that elevate the reader to a higher state of consciousness, to allow them to reach a state of aesthetic bliss; ‘a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art is the norm’(Lolita, afterword, 358).For Pater it is the stream of these impressions, apprehended within the ‘chamber of the individual mind’ (209) that form each individual reality. This notion of perceived reality is something that Nabokov dwells upon in much of his writing, he believed that whilst there existed a single, shared ‘average reality… of general ideas’, it was not what he considered ‘true reality’(Morris, 97) for each of us in turn see the fleeting impressions of life differently, thus any artistic attempt to recreate shared emotions of ‘human pain or joy’, or depict life realistically is a fruitless endeavour. 

The surrealist world of Nabokov’s 1935 novel Invitation to a Beheading concerns itself with the idea of multiple, subjective realities. Without the reader being conscious of the authors intent, it seemingly represents a critical view of the political climate of its conception, with its allusions to the fascist states that were emerging across Europe. However, Nabokov in his introduction to Invitation explicitly noted that any allusion to the ‘dull beastly farce… should concern the good reader as little as it does me’ (7). For Nabokov the ‘good reader’ is one whom reads with the understanding that ‘art never expresses anything but itself’, thus any apparent contextual readings are mere coincidence. Surrealism as a twentieth century artistic movement sought to depict the manifestations of the unconscious mind with André Breton describing it as ‘diction of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason’ allowing the impressions of the mind to control the artists work (46).  Cincinnatus’s supposed crime of ‘gnostical turpitude’ (ITAB,61), is what distinguishes him from the world around him- while he maintains an ‘opacity’, an ‘impenetrability’, all others appear as ‘wretched spectres’ that mirror ‘bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares andeverything that passes down here for real life’ (31).Cincinnatus being the only impervious being suggests that the world around him is a mere manifestation of his subconscious. The cell that contains Nabokov’s protagonist can also be seen from a Paterian perspective to be ‘the impression of the individual in his isolation’ the walls of cell being the mind that keeps ‘as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world’ (Pater, 209).  Nabokov’s fellow contemporary Russian Poet Vladislav Khodasevich was following this same trail of thought when he suggested that the return of the protagonist to the world of ‘beings akin to him’ (ITOB,191) at the novels conclusion represents ‘the return of the artist from creative work to reality’ (Connolly, 7), thus returning from a state of Aesthetic bliss. However, it is also possible to consider the novel from a reversed perspective in which the ‘hastily assembled and painted world’ (ITAB,44) could alternatively represent the ambiguous ‘reality of general ideas’ that all individuals share, while the protagonist’s dreams are fleeting impressions of the higher plane of aesthetic consciousness. Cincinnatus’s assertionthat ‘it exists my dream world, it must exist, since surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy’ insinuates that general reality is a mere ‘clumsy copy’ (105) of the limitless possibilities of art, which reflects Oscar Wilde’s assertion that ‘life imitates art’ (decay of lying). In this reversed reading the beings ‘akin to him’ are fellow artists. Yet, regardless of the reading one might choose to follow, perhaps the true aesthetic implication of the text is the beauty of its intricacy, as ‘art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex’ (Toffler, 6). 

Nabokov’s much later novella Pale Fire is similarly an exploration into the aesthetics of subjective realities.The very foundations of the text concern the idea of alternative perceptions and while some believe that Nabokov satirically created the character of Charles Kinbote to represent a poor interpreter of art, the embodiment of the failed imagination, antithetical to the ‘good reader’, the Zembla of his reality is by no means aesthetically inferior to the Cantos of John Shades world. In fact, it is arguably the plurality of perceived realities that compose the texts ‘aesthetic puzzle’ (Goddard, 3), by choosing to overlook the inaccuracy of Kinbotes commentary, interjections of Nabokov’s own aesthetic philosophy can be noted. The rejection of naturalism as the subject of great art is seen through the Eynstein oil paintings of Kinbote’s Royal Zemblan gallery. The artist’s technique of carefully inserting real ‘material elsewhere imitated by paint’ had the effect of highlighting the flaws of the artist’s work, the author states that reality should never be ‘the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye’ (PF, 107). By attempting to interject real life into painting, the whole aesthetic becomes corrupted. Pale Fire can be seen as the Nabokovian rejection of any art that deals in human emotions or felt experience. In much the same way the authorial interjection in ‘The Fight’ digresses from an ending of sentiment, we see Kinbote overwrite the emotion of John Shades poem through his digressions into the fictional world of Zembla. One might argue that our incapacity to draw exact meaning and understanding from the multidimensional worlds of both Invitation and Pale Fireis Nabokov succeeding in creating art which transcends general reality and ‘creates its own special reality’.

Nabokov talked of the ‘postustoronnost’ (Dann, 122) or the other worldly, as his primary theme, he seemed to believe that transcendence- experience beyond the fabric of the physical world- was achievable through art. This idea is echoed in the way the impervious artist, Cincinnatus, unlike the deteriorating world around him appears immortal, even in death. Fred Skolnic believed Nabokov was attempting to convey that ‘death may be conquered by art and reality by the imagination’, and thus the enlightened conscience of the artist, is capable of surpassing the physical world of mortality. The Decadent artists of the Fin De Siecle- referring to theend of the nineteenth century-were similarly fascinated by the possibility of transcendence through art.  In a scientifically driven, positivist age they were ‘seeking for a world beyond their own’ (Pittock, 4), however they rejected the notion that the path to transcendence involved a search for beauty, which they associated with the temporal. While the exact essence of the Decadent aesthetic is difficult to grasp, at its heart lies the idea of decay, deterioration and to some extent obscenity. Edgar Allan Poe, a forefather to the Decadent movement, and avid believer in the idea that poetry should be written for the sole sake of itself, actually aligned beauty with such images of decay, writing that ‘the death… of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’ (Poe, 702). It is interesting to note Alfred Appels assertion that Poe is referenced over twenty times throughout Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), however regardless of his evident influence, what is perhaps more interesting to consider is the decadent images of decay and anti-beauty that appear so recurrently throughout a book that on the surface concerns itself with the idea of youthful beauty. 

Before even delving into the the decadence that appears throughout Lolita, it might first be worthwhile to note something of Nabokov’s aesthetic technique, in much the way Poe stated a book would be internally ‘elaborated to its denouncement’ (702) before pen had even met paper, Nabokov notes that ‘the entire structure’ of the novel is beforehand ‘dimly illuminated in one’s mind’ (Toffler, 6). Within his afterword ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’he expanded this process by referring to the ‘subliminal co-ordinates’ around which the book is plotted, which he labelled ‘the nerves of the novel’ (360). Perhaps the most curious of these preconceived images that he detailed in his afterword was that of ‘pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly Schiller’ (360). Nabokov could have left his most celebrated work at a point of ambiguity, with the fate of Lolita remaining uncertain, and yet the image of decaying, frail Lolita, in a state antithetical to her former nymphet beauty was for Nabokov inseparable from his aesthetic vision of the text. The reader of the Foreword must also proceed to read the entirety of the text in the knowledge that the eponymous Lolita is now dead. Alfred Appel, Nabokov’s former student noted that ‘the entire physical world of Lolita seems to be maimed’ (228), from the disfigured hands of Richard Schiller to the haunting image of the ‘mangled remains of Charlotte Humbert’ (110), whose discovery by her husband Nabokov conveys to the reader in the Paterian style as a series of fleeting impressions; ‘rug-heap, car, old man doll…propped up, imprisoned, decrepit lady’ (110). Images of decay litter the novel; death, youth and perverse sexuality seem to intertwine from the texts offset with the abrupt demise of Lolita’s precursor, Annabel. while Lolitamight have never been categorised as a decadent novel, it inarguably showcases Nabokov’s tendency towards vulgarity and the decadent in his aestheticism. 

As aforementioned the Decadent aesthetic is difficult to define simply, Murray G.H. Pittock in his ‘Spectrum of Decadence’ noted how to ‘to Max Beerbohm, decadence was artifice; to Robert Hitchens, it was unconventional and exhibitionist behaviour; to John Davidson and Jocelyn Quilp, it was immortality; to G. S. Street, the lust for unusual experience’(3), one particular thinker who tired himself endlessly over the concept in his later life was Friedrich Nietzsche, who’s accumulative writing on the topic is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. While he failed to recognise a simple aesthetic of decadence Bernheimer suggested that ‘decadence for Nietzsche is a woman’ (20). In much the same way Nabokov’s writing unremittingly digresses into denunciations of Freudian theory, the Nabokovian canon presents itself with seemingly endless allusions to the abhorred female form. The Nabokovian woman is perhaps the most recurrent decadent tradition within his aesthetic- note the distinct use of the term woman, as the nymphet visions of young girls are perhaps the only exceptions in his abhorrence of the female form. To expand on the Nietzschean idea of decadence, what was particularly repulsive about the female body was its ‘natural functions’, he asserted that only once a woman had been ‘denatured’ (20) was she even conceivable. This idea of the ‘denatured’ woman correlates directly with Nabokov’s obsession with the ‘nymphet’.  We see the ‘first little throb’ (11) of his controversial fascination in his short text The Enchanterwhich he recalled composing in 1939. The young unnamed girl of this work is referred to within the first few lines as ‘my unique flame’ (21), which in itself might be borrowed from the Paterian image of a ‘hard gem like flame’, if so then the image of the young denatured nymphet for Nabokov represents the height of aesthetic bliss.  The narrator of The Enchanter complies with this notion when in attempting to justify his immoral desires he pleads with his readers to ‘ascend to a higher plane’ (22) of reason, arguably the transgressive sexual desires of his character’s are very much in line with the themes of 19thcentury decadence. And yet the ‘unique flame’ of the nymphet is the antithesis of the matured woman. The Enchanter exceeds Lolita in the extremity of both its debauched sexual imagery and its descriptions of women, Charlotte Haze’s unnamed precursor is described as ‘a tall, pale, broad-hipped lady, with a hairless wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose’(37), her form is so vulgar the narrator feels he ‘would be physically unable to tackle those broad bones… the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin’(55). For Nietzsche and Nabokov alike, the pinnacle of decadence is a woman, whom once ‘natured’ ceases to exist as an object of beauty. 

While ‘art for art sake’ supposes that no moral sentiment or meaning can be derived from art, that it, professes ‘frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass’ (Pater 213), it might be asked whether Nabokov claimed to adhere to this as a means of avoiding the questions of morality that arise within his more controversial texts. Oscar Wilde argued that ‘vice and virtue’ (preface, 3) are the materials most accessible to the artist, and indeed many decadent novels sit antithetically from the strict social conducts of their era. One might argue that regardless of whether art imitates life or visa versa both contain vice and virtue in equal measure and thus neither can exclude one or the other. However, can ‘art for art sake’ justify the immoral and potentially harmful in art, especially if we are to accept the aesthetic statement that ‘life imitates art’? The Fin De Siecle produced some of most debauched examples of ‘art for art sake’ decadence, in particular Octave Mirbeau’s 1899 The Torture Garden which showcases violence in the form of the eponymous Chinese torture garden, a theatre of all that is ‘obscene and cruel’ (99), and yet Mirabeau’s images of death are meticulously aesthetically arranged, intermingled with beauty and sexual desire. Similarly, we see Nabokov within The Enchanter justify themes of obscenity with the notion of aesthetic bliss: ‘what if the way to true bliss is indeed through a still delicate membrane, before it has had time to harden, become overgrown, lose the fragrance and the shimmer through which one penetrates to the throbbing star of that bliss’ (22). The pederast imaginings of the narrator in these lines are unquestionably disconcerting, the ‘still delicate membrane’ referring to the anatomy of the young ‘denatured’ girl, to borrow Nietzsche’s term, her corruption being the source of unimagined bliss. Sexuality and cruelty appear to exclude each other in both the writings of Mirabeau and Nabokov, however the ‘monsters’ that represent the immoral within Mirabeau are justified by means of aesthetic philosophy within the text; ‘what you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding… Isn’t a man of genius a monster…like all individuals who live beyond social lies, in the dazzling and divine immortality of things?’ (298). Perhaps Mirabeau is suggesting that what is considered ‘monstrous’ within the realm of lived life is a subject of beauty within art, and that no topic ought to be excluded from the ‘divine immortality’ that art promises. Returning to The Fight we see Nabokov echoing a similar statement when he refines the ‘frenzied face of (a woman’s’) father as he pummelled her lover’ (146) to the inimitable ‘play of shadows and light’. Perhaps what categorises Nabokov as an adherer of aesthetic philosophy as opposed to a writer of immorality is the arrangement of his prose, the intertwining of intricate aesthetics with debauchery, in the same way Mirabeau sets up his theatre of torture amid the beautiful flowers of the garden. 

Something that is inseparable from Nabokov when considering him within the long tradition of nineteenth century Aestheticism is the incorporation of the synesthetic within his prose. Synaesthesia as a condition was recognised within Western thought during the late nineteenth century, and popularised as an artistic concept by Arthur Rimbaud’s 1883 sonnet ‘Voyelles’ which assigned images of distinct colour to the letters of the alphabet. This neurological condition is the result of two or more senses intertwining to create a new cognitive pathway, the specific combination of colours and letters being Grapheme Synaesthesia, which like Rimbaud, affected Nabokov.  In the wake of the conditions psychological recognition it was seen by some to represent a form of degeneracy and to others, specifically those within the Aesthetic and Decadent movement, to represent ‘artistic sensitivity and even genius’ (Dann, 23). In the way it is common of Nabokov to interject the autobiographic within his work, many of his characters appear to posses this same artistic gift. Reconsidering the idea of ‘gnostical turpitude’ within Initiation to a Beheading, what separates Cincinnatus’s as ‘opaque’ is perhaps his attentiveness to the details of life, his engagement with the sensory. Even within his prison, within ‘the confining phenomena of life’ he is able to reimagine himself amongst the crowds of the city where ‘to the accompaniment of a brass band, dappled sunlight runs along the sloping streets’ (25). Cincinnatus arguably represents a feeling of isolation within a world that does not experience the same levels of heightened perception, which undoubtedly Nabokov believed his Synaesthesia gave him. The protagonist’s association between memory and the sensory also relates to Nabokov’s eidecticism- his ability to recall memory with an unheeded vividness- which he detailed later in life within his semi-autobiographic text Speak Memory. The idea that the sensory can form a bridge between present reality and past memory, relates to the nineteenth century belief that synaesthesia was indeed a form of superior perception, that could allow the artist to transcend reality. 

It is not inconceivable to believe that Nabokov sincerely adhered to ‘art for art sake’ since the construction of a text was not hypothetically aesthetic to him, it was quite literally a visual experience, with each word order forming a distinct pattern. While Nabokov’s synaesthesia only allowed him to associate colours with the act of writing, we see recurrently his desire to incorporate the medium of sound within his prose. Nabokov confessed in interview that while he desired to perceive music with the same heightened sensibility, it often appeared to him as a succession of ‘irritating sounds’ (Speak memory, 35), however many artists of the nineteenth century that influenced Nabokov, particularly Russian Symbolist Alexander Blok, deemed music and writing as inseparable. One of Nabokov’s most distinct pieces of synesthetic writing is entitled Sounds and sits within The Collected Stories.The text is so aesthetically interesting because it attempts to unite all the sensory mediums and explain the dream like world of the synesthetic imagination, with the notion of harmony lying at its centre. The narrator perceives the visuals around him with a feeling of ‘enraptured equilibrium’ (21), he notes that ‘at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves…everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance… all was unified, equivalent, divine’ (21). This interplay of senses to create harmony, relates to the writings of Baudelaire, a key figure of the Decadent movement, who discussed such synesthetic themes is his translated 1857 poem Correspondences; 

‘Like endless echoes that from somewhere far beyond 

Mingling, in one profound and cryptic whole unite, 

Vast as the twinkling immensities of night and light 

So do all colours, sounds and perfumes correspond.’ 

To have a heightened engagement with one’s surroundings and be acute to the sensory within the world can be said to directly relate back to Paters idea of burning ‘with a hard gem like flame’ or as he expands ‘in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’ (212).  The synesthetic writer maintains this ‘gem like flame’ through their acuteness of perception. They are capable of transcending average reality through the unification of ‘colours, sounds and perfumes’, which propels them into a heightened sense of reality, an aesthetic bliss, which the true artist recaptures through their work.  

While Nabokov considered The Fight to be a ‘bottom of the barrel’ work, his own interjection in the final lines of the text offers such a detailed insight into his aesthetic philosophy that it ought not be discredited within his oeuvre. As an author that was so invested in setting up his legacy and in doing so discredited the influence of so many of his predecessors, it remains difficult to place Nabokov distinctly within any long nineteenth century literary traditions. However, what can be said is that he avidly rejected didacticism and naturalist prose that sought to depict lived experience. His belief that ‘a work of art has no importance whatsoever to society’ (Toffler, 6) suggests that regardless of his own aversion to ‘art for art sake’, he is in fact an adherer to the philosophy of the Aestheticism. Similarly, while he is by no means a markedly Decadent Novelist, interjections of decadence, decay and anti-beauty appear so frequently that they are arguably inseparable from his literary aesthetic. 

List of works cited 

Appel, A. ‘‘Lolita’: The Springboard of Parody’, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature,vol. 8, No. 2, A Special Number Devoted to Vladimir Nabokov. University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.

Baudelaire, C. ‘Correspondances’, Fleurs du mal. 1857

Bernheimer, C. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. JHU Press, 2002. 

Breton, André. Manifesto of Surrealism. University of Michigan Press, 1969. Reprint. 

Connolly, J. W. Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion. Northwestern University Press, 1997. 

Dann, K. T. Bright Colors Falsely seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. Yale University Press, 1998

Farina, W. Vladimir Nabokov and the Vulgar Aesthetic. University of South Florida, 2010. Thesis. 

Gautier, T. Mademoiselle de Maupin. London: Penguin Books, 2005. Reprint. 

Goddard, J.J. ‘Realising and Imagining ‘Aesthetic Bliss’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire’. Berkeley Undergraduate Journal. University of California Berkeley, 2011.

Nabokov, V. Invitation to a beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. London: Penguin Books, 1963. Print.

Nabokov, V. Lolita.London: Penguin Books, 1995. Reprint. 

Nabokov, V. ‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’. Lolita.London: Penguin Books, 1995. Reprint

Nabokov, V. Pale Fire. London: Penguin Books, 1973. Print. 

Nabokov, V. ‘Sounds’. Collected Stories. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Reprint. 

Nabokov, V. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Penguin Classics; New ed, 2000.

Nabokov, V. The Enchanter.Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. London: Penguin Books. London: Pan Books Ltd, 1986. Print.

Nabokov, V. ‘The Fight’. Collected Stories.Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Reprint. 

Mirbeau, O. The Torture garden. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014. Reprint.

Morris, P. D. Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice. University of Toronto Press, 2011. Reprint.

Pater, W. H. ‘Conclusion’. Studies in the History of the Renaissance. London: Macmillan and Co. 1873. Print.

Pittock, M. G. H. Spectrum of Decadence; The Literature of the 1890’s. Routledge, 2014. 

Poe, E. A. ‘The Philosophy of composition’.The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volumes B (1820-1865), edited by Elliot, A. M, Gustafson, S.A, Hungerford, A., Levine, R.S. & Loeffelholz, M.  W.W. Norton & Company; 9thEdition, 2017. 

Rimbaud, A. Voyelles.France: Lutèce, 1883

Skolnik, F. Violins in the Void: 3 by Nabokov. Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 2. June 2015. 

Toffler, A. ‘The Playboy Interview: Men of Letters’, Playboy. January 1964

‘Vladimir Nabokov.’ Author Archive Collection, BBC Radio 4, 1970, published; 13 June 2014

Wilde, O. ‘Preface’, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Reprint.

Wilde, O. The Decay of Lying. Alabama Books, 2018. 14thed. Modern Library, 1998. Reprint.