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Khrushcheva on Nabokov

Yesterday evening I was at the New School University on 12th Street listening to Nina Khrushcheva read from, and talk about, "Imagining Nabokov", her new book, which also, or so it seems to me, constitutes a new genre—part literary criticism (of Nabokov's novels), part political science (about Russia and the West), and part magical realism (about her own imagined relationship with Nabokov). All written in a voice that slips in and out of Nabokov's own.

Seeing Nina sitting there as Author is a faintly scary moment. I know her well as a friend and coversationalist. Yet here she is revealed, no question, as a great writer.

She manages modestly and well the parallels between her own life and Nabokov's. As she says in her introduction:

Vadimir Nabokov's family was of political significance in Russia in the early 1900s. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, was an intellectual and a member of Russia's aristocratic ruling class, serving in the Russian provisional government in 1917 before the Bolshevik Revolution. My own family was of Soviet political significance in the mid-1950s. From Joseph Stalin's death in 1953 to 1964, Nikita Khrushchev, my great-grandfather, headed the ruling class of the Communist nomenklatura as the party's general secretary. The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution drove the Nabokovs out of the country, depriving them of their aristocratic privileges. The 1964 plenary meeting of the Communist politburo ousted Khrushchev ... Despite the world of difference between these two "oustings" they qualify both families as part of a "deposed elite".

Nabokov's family took him into European exile in 1919; he went to America to escape the Nazis in 1940. Nina left Russia in 1991 to study comparative literature at Princeton:

[F]rom what our families had been in Russia's politics and society—the ruling class—we, Nabokov and I, both became thoroughly middle-class in America.

Nina may have rivals as a critic of Nabokov's novels, but she has none, I think, as a commentator on Nabokov's hinterland and sensibilities, nor on his use of language—writing, as she also does, in an English that is a perfectly-learned second language after Russian.

And, thanks to her dual perspective, she has precious few equals in the brisk judgements she passes on Russia and the West. For example, from "Imagining Nabokov":

Russians continue to think that appearing as a unique soul, or an altogether misunderstood nation, is more satisfing than being a sated bourgeois in a comfortable country with no grand ideals to explore. From generation to generation, the conscious, orderly and patient accumulation of personal achievement and success has been in conflict with the Russian values of unlimited hospitality and humility, boundless passion, and universal love. Fate should take care of those who can't take care of themselves.

I was also delighted last night to be reminded of a word of Russian which cries out for wider currency in the West: poshlost, which Nina defines as "banality, complacency, vulgarity", but with the implication that these qualities are the norm, the average.

Nina insists that there is no exact translation into English, and I shall have to believe her. But given how perfectly poshlost describes the world around us, at least as experienced after a certain age, it surely deserves to make the jump into the OED.