[In the following essay, Karlinsky examines the sources of two of Nabokov's plays and their similarities to his novels.]

It was Vladislav Khodasevich who in 1937 characterized Nabokov as a writer obsessed with a single theme.¹ Nabokov's writings of the subsequent decades have confirmed the accuracy of this observation. Nabokov's central theme is, of course, the nature of the creative imagination and the solitary, freak-like role into which a man gifted with such imagination is inevitably cast in any society. Such a person may be shown pursuing his basic endeavor directly (e.g., Sebastian Knight or the hero of The Gift), but more often, as Khodasevich pointed out, Nabokov's artist-hero is disguised by means of some mask that may appear at first glance unrelated to artistic creation. Thus, the work of art that the hero strives to create, or at times actually achieves, may be presented in the guise of chess playing (The Defense), butterfly collecting (“The Aurelian”), a murder (Despair), seduction of a young girl (Lolita), preservation of one's own individuality in a nightmarish totalitarian world (Invitation to a Beheading), or of simply trying to reconstruct one's identity (The Eye). In all these cases, however, the hero uses his imagination to devise a reality of his own, which he seeks to impose on the surrounding reality. The question of which reality is real, that of the hero or that of his environment, is usually left open. What matters is which of the two realities is the more relevant one for the artistic conception of the particular novel or story.

With this constant and pervasive interest in the artificially produced illusion of reality and in the genuinely experienced reality of illusion, it would seem inevitable for Nabokov to become interested in drama as a literary form. Indeed, throughout his European period, when he wrote in Russian only, Nabokov repeatedly attempted the dramatic genre. His three brief verse plays, published in Berlin in 1923 and 1924 (“Death,” “The Grandfather,” and “The [North] Pole”), are not yet mature Nabokov. Reading these plays, one is struck by the testimony they offer to the autobiographical significance of those passages in The Gift that describe the hero's literary apprenticeship to Pushkin. The particular brand of iambic pentameter, the general diction, and occasionally even the sentence structure of Pushkin's “little tragedy,” Mozart and Salieri, are effectively copied in Nabokov's three little plays, which could perhaps be more aptly characterized as narrative poems in dramatic form. Also evident is their stylistic relationship to the most neglected of Pushkin's verse narratives, Angelo (Pushkin's version of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure), which the hero of The Gift is also said to have studied. The most obviously Nabokovian of these early plays, “Death,” uses a situation that was later to reappear in a pivotal passage in The Eye: an unsuccessful would-be suicide believes himself dead and takes his continuing life for a posthumous experience. Not much can be said of Nabokov's five-act play The Man from the U.S.S.R. (1927), since only its first act has been published.² It is apparently a spy thriller with a film actress for a heroine and it seems to have been performed by an émigré company in Berlin soon after its writing.

The most interesting and significant work to date of Nabokov the playwright was all done in a single year. It consists of the two full-length plays, The Event (Sobytie) and The Waltz Invention (Izobretenie Val'sa), both written in 1938 and published the same year in the Paris émigré journal Russkie Zapiski. (The Waltz Invention is now also available in English, in a somewhat revised version.³) These two plays, written after such mature novels as The Exploit (Podvig), Despair, and The Gift, benefit from Nabokov's literary mastery at its most original and inventive. Both plays are firmly connected with Nabokov's central preoccupation with creative imagination. Like the novels, they are also “portraits of an artist as something else. The Event can be described as a portrait of an artist as a coward, and The Waltz Invention as a portrait of an artist as a madman-politician. These descriptions are of course schematic, aimed at pointing out the basic similarity of the two plays to Nabokov's novels; there are many additional aspects of these plays that such a scheme could not even begin to indicate.

The principal character in The Event is an artist without disguise: he is a professional painter. Painting is an art form that, after literature, interests Nabokov most, and discussions of it figure prominently in The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Pnin. In The Event, the passages about painting are central to the audience's understanding of the protagonist and the author's attitude towards him. Nabokov seems to enjoy devising and describing imaginary paintings, which he then ascribes to his fictional painters, in the same way Thomas Mann devised and described the musical compositions of his hero in Doctor Faustus. The personality and the artistic development of the painter Vsevolod Romanov in The Gift may contain a few remote references to the career of Nabokov's fellow-émigré, Pavel Chelishchev (usually spelled Tchelitchew), although Romanov's paintings, as described in the novel, evoke instead the work of René Magritte. On the other hand, the paintings of Aleksei Troshcheikin, the hero of The Event, as they are outlined in the stage directions and discussed in several of his speeches, strongly recall the work of Chelishchev himself (and so, incidentally, does the imaginary portrait of Sebastian Knight, with its reflecting pool and aquatic spider). Troshcheikin's paintings in the play serve as his credentials: they are the one wholly serious thing about this weak and inept hero, whose genuine artistic gift cannot protect him from triviality and humiliation in the other areas of his life.

Troshcheikin, his wife Liubov, his mother-in-law, and their friends are apparently Russian exiles who live in a small provincial town, possibly in one of the Baltic countries in the'thirties. At the beginning of the play, news is received that Liubov's former lover, who had been serving a prison sentence for attempting to kill Troshcheikin, had been unexpectedly released and is probably intending now to carry out his original plan. The rest of the play is primarily a record of Troshcheikin's panicky reaction to this threat to his life. Social amenities go on as usual: the mother-in-law celebrates her birthday and receives guests; sympathy and concern for the hero's predicament are ostensibly shown by those around him. Yet, as night approaches, the hapless painter finds himself alone and unprotected as logic and reality desert his world, leaving in their stead only danger and absurdity.

Reviewing the original Paris stage production of The Event, Khodasevich wrote that “Fear” would have been a more suitable title for this play. The “event,” anticipated with mixed feelings throughout the play by Troshcheikin and the other characters, never does materialize. In the carefully contrived anticlimactic finale we learn that Troshcheikin's fears were groundless all along. By subjecting the artist-hero of this gay and sparkling comedy (“dramatic comedy in three acts” is the author's designation) to an intolerable ordeal by fear and betrayal, Nabokov not only restates his major theme of the artist's solitude, but illustrates, better than in any of his other works, Pushkin's oft-quoted statement that apart from his sacrifice to Apollo the artist may at times be the most insignificant of the insignificant, mindless children of this world.

When The Event was first published and then produced in Paris in 1938, émigré reviewers were quick to point out similarities between Nabokov's play and Gogol's The Inspector General. Russian reviewers and viewers, with their thorough knowledge of Russian classics, could not fail to spot the textual references and other allusions to Gogol's comedy. What can be termed the Gogolian reference series is set up early in the play, when a character named Revshin (a name formed from the first syllables of the Russian titles of The Inspector General and The Overcoat), who is the hero's best friend and the current secret lover of his wife, announces the impending danger in terms deliberately reminiscent of Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky's entrance in the first act of The Inspector General. The end of the first act finds Liubov hanging out of the window in a state of extreme curiosity and excitement, recapitulating the situation of the mayor's wife at the end of the first act of Gogol's play. The Gogolian references, all to The Inspector General, are repeated at various unexpected points in the other two acts of the play. Two ladies in the birthday party episode argue about who is to tell the story of Troshcheikin's predicament first, and thus evoke again Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky. The first name and patronymic of a minor but important character called Meshaev turn out to be Osip Mikheich, a name made up of Khlestakov's servant and the offstage Saint Petersburg janitor mentioned in the letter read at the end of the play. These textual references to Gogol are clear enough. What a closer examination of Nabokov's comedy reveals, however, is that its structure is in fact a kind of free variation on the main peripeteia of The Inspector General.

The action of Gogol's comedy hinges on three pivotal developments: the mayor's announcement that an inspector is on the way; the false news that Khlestakov is the inspector, which triggers off the main action; and the final revelation that the real inspector has arrived. (We can ignore for structural purposes the postmaster's discovery that Khlestakov was not the inspector, since the audience has known that all along.) Similarly, Nabokov has disposed the action of The Event around three announcements, made by characters whose function is analogous to heralds and messengers in classical drama. In the first act, Revshin, nicknamed “hairy tapeworm” by his business associates, reveals that the hero's enemy is at large; and for the rest of the play he keeps the hero and the audience informed of the enemy's movements, while consistently misconstruing his intentions and motives. In the second act, the second herald, Osip Mikheich Meshaev (while his first name and patronymic evoke the two Gogolian servants, the last name has connotations of meddlesomeness and ineptitude) causes some merriment at the afternoon birthday party for Troshcheikin's mother-in-law by rushing in with Revshin's original news, by now familiar to the entire cast. It is Meshaev's twin brother (played by the same actor, of course) who, arriving by mistake late in the evening after the party is finished, resolves the tension by his unexpected and casual revelation that the dreaded enemy has departed for good. This quasi-Gogolian structure gives the comedy a symmetry that is almost classical in its contrived elegance.

The obvious Gogolian references are solidly integrated within the framework of Nabokov's comedy. Less organic to the play and less apparent, but occurring more frequently, is the second major series of literary references. These references evoke the plays and stories of Anton Chekhov and his connections with the Moscow Art Theater. The Chekhovian references begin even before Revshin initiates the Gogolian ones, and they are associated mostly with Troshcheikin's wife, Liubov. Nabokov's heroine has a mother named Antonina Pavlovna, the feminine equivalent of Chekhov's first name and patronymic. Soon after her appearance on the stage, Liubov Troshcheikina launches into a lament for her long-dead little son, in a kind of serious parody on the similar first-act lament of her Chekhovian namesake, Liubov Ranevskaya, in The Cherry Orchard.

The scenes that involve Liubov are from then on quite regularly accompanied by some reference to Chekhov. There are citations of “A Dreary Story” and The Three Sisters; Liubov has friends named Stanislavsky and Vishnevsky (the latter being the name of a Moscow Art Theater actor who was a friend of Chekhov, who appeared in original productions of his plays, and whose name happens to suggest the Russian title of The Cherry Orchard); Liubov's husband, Troshcheikin, turns out to be named Aleksei Maksimovich (just like Gorky); and in the second act, Liubov ascribes to her former lover a carefully garbled version of Chekov's famous maxim about the use of firearms in dramatic structure of plays. Her current lover, Revshin, tells Liubov in a somewhat inept compliment that she was “conceived by Chekhov, executed by Rostand and played by Duse.” Throughout the play there are deliberately twisted bits of dialogue from Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. There is possibly even an echo of Chekhov's Mme Merchutkina (from The Jubilee) in the dialogue between the comical cook, Marfa, and Liubov at the beginning of the third act.

There are also more general ways in which one could connect Nabokov's play to the work of Anton Chekhov. The inability of Troshcheikin and his wife to achieve meaningful communication, to see the position in which the other spouse is placed, is of course a recurrent and typical Chekhovian situation, exemplified in such stories as “The Name-Day Party” or “The Calamity.” The cowardly behavior of Chekhov's Laevsky in “The Duel” and his difficulties with his common-law wife Nadezhda likewise have similarities with the predicament and the marital troubles of Nabokov's hero. In both “The Duel” and The Event, the woman's infidelity is treated as a casual and insignificant factor so far as the hero is concerned, his inability to communicate with her being far more important. Finally, the play's title (Sobytie) happens to be identical with that of an early short story by Chekhov. This is one of Chekhov's stories about adult callousness to sensitive and impressionable children (the English version by Constance Garnett is called “An Incident”). The kittens of a house cat, which become for one day the very center of the universe for two small children, are devoured by a great Dane brought to the house by a visitor. The children are horrified and disconsolate, but the adults are indifferent and even mildly amused. The story is early Chekhov (1886), over-explicit and given to moralizing. At first glance, it seems to have nothing in common with Nabokov's play, except the coincidentally identical title, and, by further coincidence, a time structure that comprises a single day. And yet, a closer reading of Chekhov's story cannot fail to suggest a deeper parallel in the two works: the basic theme of both is the intrusion of danger and violence into an ordered existence, and the indifference with which this violence can be accepted by ordinary, decent people. The similarity of the theme and of the title may be purely accidental (sobytie is, after all, a common Russian word). Still, the conclusion of Chekhov's story, when read in the light of Nabokov's play, does seem to add a new dimension to the play's significance:

It seems to the children that all the people, every single one of them in the house, would become alarmed and pounce upon the villain Nero [the dog]. But the people sit calmly, each in his place, and only marvel at the huge dog's appetite. Papa and mamma laugh. … Nero walks around the table, wags his tail and smugly licks his chops. … The mother-cat alone is perturbed. Her tail stretched, she walks from one room to another, casts suspicious glances at the people and miaows piteously.

—Children, it is after nine! Time to go to bed!—shouts mamma.

Vanya and Nina go to bed, weep and keep thinking for a long time about the hurt cat and about the cruel, insolent and unpunished Nero.

The barrage of parodistic references in The Event to Russian classics becomes particularly dense with the appearance of the grotesquely incompetent detective Barboshin toward the end of the play. The entire role of this character is an excellent example of what later was to be called the theater of the absurd. In a play written in 1938, Barboshin's scenes offer an unmistakable foreshadowing of certain mannerisms of both Pinter and Ionesco; but much of the ostensible absurdity is simultaneously literary parody. The first entrance of Nabokov's comically Dostoevskian Sherlock Holmes is an outrageous parody on Zosima's bow to Mitya Karamazov. Before his major scene is over, the detective has run through several well-known quotations from Dostoevsky, made allusions to Turgenev's Smoke (apparently a favorite of Nabokov's, this novel is also alluded to in two of his novels), and engaged Troshcheikin in an argument based on a close similarity between his name and that of the offstage antagonist from whose violence he is supposedly protecting the hero. This argument is seemingly patterned after the equally senseless exchange between Chekhov's Doctor Chebutykin and Captain Soleny in The Three Sisters about chekhartma (a Georgian meat course) and cheremsha (a kind of scallion). The sound of the words that are the subject of the argument in Chekhov may furnish one possible clue as to why most of the male characters in The Event have such unusually raucous Russian names, with their clashes of r's and sibilants: Troshcheikin, Revshin, Barbashin (the antagonist), Barboshin (the detective).

The parody of the Chekhovian argument is closely followed by the parodistic high point of the play, the detective's soliloquy, which is a truly vicious mockery of the more optimistic speeches of Chekhov's Colonel Vershinin from The Three Sisters, of his Sonya from Uncle Vanya, and of several of Dostoevsky's characters. For all its irreverence and seeming ridicule, the parodistic evocation of these idealistic literary characters has a definite function within the scheme of Nabokov's comedy. The climax of literary parody comes at the point when Troshcheikin's efforts to defend himself and to cope with his predicament take on a hopeless and ludicrous form. The much-vaunted “humanistic” traditions of his native literature (and, in this sense, it is irrelevant that the author of the play may love Chekhov and loathe Dostoevsky) are as powerless to help him as are his wife, his friends, and even his art.

The profusion of literary references in The Event recalls Nabokov's earlier novel The Gift, similarly saturated with allusions to Russian literature. In the novel, however, this material is used for serious literary and historical commentary, while in the play its function is parodistic and humorous. In their frequency of incidence, the literary quotations and allusions serve an additional purpose: they deliberately disrupt the carefully contrived realistic surface of the play. Several other devices are also used to sabotage the illusion of realism. These include the suggestions by Liubov's graphomane mother about how the dramatic situations onstage would have been handled had she been the author of the play in which she is one of the characters; the stage directions Liubov issues to the cook Marfa (or possibly to the actress playing this role) about how to achieve a more traditional characterization of a Russian peasant woman; and the remark of Meshaev II that both he and his twin brother are played by the same actor, though with varying degrees of success (ostensibly a metaphor but actually a description of an onstage fact). One of the lady guests at the birthday party keeps lapsing into verse. Nabokov's usual love of puns is given a free rein.⁴ All this creates a subtle and highly original tension between the ostensibly realistic comedy about believable people and the deliberate shattering of the realistic illusion through the author's sudden demonstrations of the literary and dramatic conventions he employs (“laying bare the device,” as such practices were termed by the Russian Formalist critics).

In the most serious passage in the entire play (at the end of Act Two), the inner reality of the artist briefly asserts itself and results in a complete breakdown of external realism. While the birthday party guests become motionless “painted ghosts,” and while real life thus becomes an immobile painting, Troshcheikin and his faithless wife achieve a moment of perfect communion as they converse in verbalized telepathy. The crude outer reality soon intrudes; the communion was inconclusive and it achieved nothing. Yet, taking place as it did while Troshcheikin and Liubov were lost in reverie during Antonina Pavlovna's reading of her new inept prose poem, the interlude underscores in a very Nabokovian way the difference between the genuine artistic insights of Troshcheikin and the amateurish pseudo-art of his mother-in-law.

The Event moves between the familiar reality of traditional Russian realistic fiction and drama and two other kinds of reality: the inner creative reality of the artist-hero, and the reality of literary references and conventions, which the author superimposes on the other two levels. The differentiation among the several levels of reality in Nabokov's other major play proceeds along different lines. The reality that surrounds the hero of The Waltz Invention is highly stylized in comparison with Troshcheikin's more realistic surroundings. The play is set in a generalized, hypothetical “never-never” land, situated equidistantly between science fiction and Viennese operetta. The inner reality of the creator-hero, Salvator Waltz, is that of his own megalomaniac imagination. This is the reality in which, as we learn only at the end, the entire action of the play takes place, with the exception of the introduction and the finale. The poor madman Salvator Waltz has imagined himself to be the possessor of a monstrously destructive invention which gives him unlimited power over other men—a power he seizes because he intends to use it for general welfare. But another kind of reality keeps breaking in periodically from the outside to thwart the hero's plans, despite the occasional boosts given to Waltz's flagging imagination by a strange, androgynous factotum named Dream (Son in the original Russian, Viola Trance in the new English translation). The selfless service to humanity, and the abolition of suffering for which the dreamer strives, turn into nightmare as he finds himself annihilating great masses of humanity for their own good. His imagination does not possess the resources necessary to conjure up the personal paradise of sensuality for which he has secretly yearned; contrary to his intentions, the erotic visions he has willed into existence turn ugly and absurd.

By the end of the second act, Waltz has gained absolute power with the aid of Dream, but this power produces chaos in his dream world once he tries to exercise it. When he perseveres, Dream deserts him: the external reality fully invades his dream world, and Salvator Waltz, like the peasant woman in Pushkin's “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” is returned to the point where he began his ascent to power. The entire action of the play has taken place within the mind of a lunatic who was waiting to be received by the Minister of War of a mythical country in regard to a non-existent invention. And yet, the issues raised by Waltz's dream of power are real, his dream world believable enough in its own terms, and the tragedy and suffering of the hero important.

The Waltz Invention takes up two major themes often encountered in Nabokov's fiction. The interpenetration of two contiguous worlds, of which one or the other is imaginary, was treated by Nabokov in The Defense and in Invitation to a Beheading. In the short story “Terra Incognita” and in The Gift (the hero's imaginary conversations with the poet Koncheev), Nabokov had developed a set of subtle devices for indicating that the action or dialogue described is taking place within a character's reverie. Similar techniques are widely used in The Waltz Invention. While Waltz is achieving his fantastic triumphs, irritating little incidents—holes or slits in the fabric of his imaginary reality—keep inflicting themselves on his dream. A toy automobile that belongs to his other existence reappears periodically under unlikely circumstances, upsetting Waltz's confidence and equilibrium. One character recites a poem that Waltz himself had composed (the character attributes the poem to Tourvalski, i.e., un tour de valse); and, before the hero's imagination forces him to re-assume the role assigned to him in the dream world, another character almost turns into a psychiatrist from the mental institution where Waltz is being treated. The entire role of Dream-Trance is also a device constantly used to cast doubts on the reality of Waltz's triumphs and disappointments.

The other basic Nabokovian theme that this play treats is the nature of absolute tyranny—both its horror and its unreal, illusory character. This theme had been treated by Nabokov in Invitation to a Beheading and in the short story “Extermination of Tyrants” (“Istreblenie tiranov”), as well as in the novel, written in English, for which this short story seems to have been a preliminary sketch, Bend Sinister. The tyrants in the short story and in Bend Sinister were crude scoundrels who used idealistic verbiage to cover up their vulgar lust for power. The madman Waltz is a genuine idealist who believes his own humanitarian speeches; but, since he also resorts to brutal and autocratic methods to achieve his high-minded goals, he ends up being no better than any other tyrant, and even the corrupt but human and flexible government he has replaced seems preferable by comparison. The point Nabokov makes here about the uses of power is not too distant from Camus' point on the same subject in La Peste.

While The Event is steeped in Russian literary traditions (a fact which poses grave problems for the translator), the native Russian birthmarks of The Waltz Invention are few. There is a faint flavor of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri in the iambic pentameter of Waltz's blank verse speeches (which are not broken into verse lines in the original Russian). The alliterative names of the lesser dream-officials, with their permutations of the same three consonants (Grib, Grab, Grob, Berg, Breg, etc.), have a possible double Russian literary parentage. The alliterative series of names itself originates in Vladimir Mayakovsky's onomatopoetic evocation of the clacking horse's hooves in his well-known poem “Kindly Treatment of Horses” (“Khoroshee otnoshenie k loshadiam”), in which the hooves apparently say: “Grib. Grab”. Grob. Grub.” i.e., “Fungus. Rob. Coffin. Crude.” But, while the sound pattern comes from Mayakovsky, the uses to which these names are put suggest the satirically treated and similarly alliterative group of government officials in Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin's nineteenth-century play The Affair (Delo)—Messrs. Hertz, Schertz, Schmertz, Ibisov and Chibisov. No other Russian literary precedents suggest themselves with any degree of immediacy.

For all that, the English translation of The Waltz Invention did present definite difficulties, which Nabokov discusses in his introduction to the new English edition. To overcome some of those difficulties, the translator at times resorts to explicating the text rather than merely translating it. The result is that the English The Waltz Invention, while on the whole a reasonable equivalent of the original, loses some of its subtlety. For one thing, the puns have become broader and more obvious. Furthermore, much that was colorful and expressive in the original Russian becomes oddly neutral in English; but then, as Nabokov's preface explains, this was the effect he wanted. His attitude toward the reader of the English versions of his earlier work is mellower and more forbearing than the one he had toward the reader of the Russian originals. The literary allusions, puns, and false leads in the original version of The Gift have largely been elucidated and deciphered in the translation. Similarly, the reader of The Waltz Invention in English has a somewhat simplified text and is thus deprived of the creative collaboration with the author in which the reader of the original Russian text was privileged to participate. At the end of his English preface, the author obligingly tells the reader just where the action of the play is taking place; he further tips his hand by referring to Salvator Waltz as “a fellow author” in the newly provided list of dramatis personae, which the original lacked. This list also labels and compartmentalizes all the episodic Bumps and Thumps (the Mayakovskian horse's hooves in the original) which tumbled about in unlabeled confusion in the Russian version. These additions would probably make a stage production easier, but in the reading version of the play the removed obstacles also take away some of the pleasure.

Vladimir Nabokov has not returned to the drama since his two important plays of 1938. The contrast between these two works is all too evident, yet both clearly fit within the rest of his work and contribute to our understanding of Nabokov's depth and scope. A parallel from another art would be offered by Maurice Ravel's two masterpieces in piano concerto form, both written within the same year (1929-1930). The Piano Concerto in G is witty and sparkling; the Concerto in D for the Left Hand Alone is brooding and introspective. Vastly different from each other in conception, execution, and mood, the two concerti are major and typical works of Ravel. The Event and The Waltz Invention are also major and typical Nabokov in their exploration of his basic themes and in their relevance to his fundamental concepts of life and art.

Notes

1. Vladislav Khodasevich, “O Sirine,” in Literaturnye stat'i i vospominaniia (New York, 1954), pp. 245-254.

2. For publication data on Nabokov's plays discussed in this article, the reader is referred to Dieter E. Zimmer's excellent bibliography, Vladimir Nabokov, Bibliographie des Gesamtwerks (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1964), p. 29.

3. Vladimir Nabokov, The Waltz Invention, trans. Dmitri Nabokov (New York, 1966).

4. A particularly complex bit of verbal buffoonery is the pun on the second part of Hamlet's question, transcribed to convey a broad Russian accent (“Zad iz zyk veshchan”) and thereby resulting in a vague Russian obscenity. The first half of the same Shakespearean quotation was later the subject of a trilingual pun in Nabokov's Bend Sinister, where “To be or not to be” is transformed in Russian into “ubit' il' ne ubit’” (instead of the traditional “byt' ili ne byt'”), which in turn results in French “L'égorgerai-je ou non.”