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| Vladimir and Véra Nabokov in Montreux (source: Figaro) |
In 1970, 71-year old Nabokov, a refugee from the age of 19, had given an interview to an Israeli journalist Nurit Beretzky. Israel of the 60s and the 70s (and, to some extent, today's Israel as well) was a land of refugees coming from many countries and speaking many languages; perhaps this is why a great deal of the interview was dedicated to the questions on the exile, homeland and mother tongue. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Do you still feel in exile?
Art is exile. I felt an exile when I was a child in Russia among other children. I kept goal on the soccer field, and all goalkeepers are exiles.
Can one adopt a foreign country for a homeland?
America, my adopted country, is the closest thing to my idea of home.
Is being a refugee means being rootless?
Rootlessness is less important than a confirmed refugee's capacity to branch and blossom in a complete – and very pleasant – void.
In which language do you think, count and dream?
I do not think in any language, I think in images, with some brief verbal surfacing of a utilitarian sort in any of the three tongues that I know, such as “damn those trucks” or “espèce de crétin”. I dream and count mostly in Russian.
Full interview is here.
"Art is exile." This beautifully put, highbrow, elusive response is such a classic Nabokov! From one hand, of course, he was in exile. He couldn't return to Russia, to Vyra, to Saint Petersburg - if only because these places, as he knew them, ceased to exist. But from the other hand, in Speak, Memory, Nabokov names as "voluntary exile" only his European years, 1919 - 1940. His american years are depicted as "the period spent in my adopted country". "Art is exile" laconically puts these contradictions together.
Tsvetaeva said something a bit similar, and yet so different in "Homesickness" (1934):
Тоска по родине! Давно
Разоблаченная морока!
Мне совершенно все равно — Где совершенно одинокой
Быть, по каким камням домой
Брести с кошелкою базарной
В дом, и не знающий, что — мой,
Как госпиталь или казарма.
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Homesickness! That long
Exposure to misery!
It’s all the same to me – Where I’m utterly lonely
Or what stones I wander
Home by, with my sacks,
Home that’s no more mine
Than a hospital, a barracks. (Translated by Elaine Feinstein?!?)
In this poem Tsvetaeva seemingly attempts to refute the notion/need? of a homesickness of a refugee. "It's all the same to me - // Where I'm utterly lonely". This refute goes on and on, until the last two lines of this long poem:
Всяк дом мне чужд, всяк храм мне пуст,
И всё — равно, и всё — едино.
Но если по дороге — куст Встает, особенно — рябина ...
Houses alien, churches empty,
All – one and the same – to me:
Yet if by the side of the road A particular bush shows – rowanberry…
There are many interpretations of Tsvetaeva's two-poem cycle "Bush" (1934). To put it very schematically, "Bush" can be seen as a dialectics/dialogue between the "bush" and "me", between the nature - and the artist. Taking this interpretation, the "utterly lonely" "I" from the "Homesickness" equals to the artist. The artist is "utterly lonely" always and everywhere, says Tsvetaeva, and thus Nabokov's "Art is exile" almost echoes Tsvetaeva's verses almost 40 years later (poor Nabokov! he would hate to echo Tsvetaeva).
However, adds Tsvetaeva almost as a postscript, the there's no reason for the artist-refugee homesickness, until he stumbles upon "a particular bush", a nature that calls the artist into an action - into being put into the artist's work. And this "particular bush", rowanberry, belongs to the artist's homeland, to Russia.
===> link to the mother tongue ==> tbc :-)
"I think in images", said Nabokov in the interview. This aligns quite neatly with Saussure. However, in translation from thinking to writing, ... In Speak, Memory Nabokov lamented on ...
Also, Nabokov's "To Russia":
Навсегда я готов затаиться
и без имени жить. Я готов,чтоб с тобой и во снах не сходиться,отказаться от всяческих снов;
обескровить себя, искалечить,
не касаться любимейших книг,променять на любое наречьевсе, что есть у меня, - мой язык.
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Не обольщусь и языком
Родным, его призывом млечным.Мне безразлично — на какомНепонимаемой быть встречным!
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