`Almost Human Happiness'

Children are often in jeopardy in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov, as they are in life. Despite his dismissal as heartless by some readers and critics, Nabokov returns obsessively to young people abused, neglected, sick, insane, deformed, dead, or simply misunderstood, though he judged his own childhood edenic. For the first time my oldest son is reading Lolita, a novel about the monstrous Humbert Humbert and his prepubescent victim, and last week Ann Fadiman sent me back to one of Nabokov’s Russian stories, “Christmas.” She mentions it in her essay collection At Large and at Small and, yes, the main character’s son is recently dead, from an unspecified illness, as the story begins. The father’s grief is reminiscent of John Shade’s for his daughter, Hazel Shade, in Pale Fire, and the old couple’s for their mad son in the story “Signs and Symbols.”

It’s winter in Russia and Sleptsov has returned to his country manor from Petersburg for the funeral of his unnamed son. His only company is Ivan, “the quiet, portly valet.” A snow-covered footbridge on his estate reminds him of his young son “walking along the slippery planks, flecked with aments, and deftly plucking off with his net a butterfly that had settled on the railing.” A few sentences later, Nabokov writes:

“Just recently, in Petersburg, after having babbled in his delirium about school, about his bicycle, about some great Oriental moth, he died, and yesterday Sleptsov had taken the coffin – weighed down, it seemed, with an entire lifetime – to the country, into the family vault near the village church.”

Sleptov visits the main house, locked up over winter, and enters the room his son used as a study over the summer. Shaking with grief, “sobbing with his whole body,” he collects his son’s lepidopteral equipment and returns to the heated wing where he’s staying. There, Ivan is putting up a two-foot fir tree. It’s Christmas Eve, and Sleptsov orders him to take it away. He reads sentences his son left in a notebook:

“`Saw a fresh specimen of the Camberwell Beauty today. That means autumn is here. Rain in the evening. She has probably left, and we didn’t even get acquainted. Farewell, my darling. I feel terribly sad. . . .’

“`He never said anything to me….’ Sleptsov tried to remember, rubbing his forehead with his palm.”

His despair is too much. He feels he is going to die, on Christmas: “Sleptsov pressed his eyes shut, and had a fleeting sensation that earthly life lay before him, totally bared and comprehensible – and ghastly in its sadness, humiliatingly pointless, sterile, devoid of miracles. . . "

At that moment, Nabokov, the great debunker of conventional fiction and its trite devices, gives us a miracle. In the warmth of Sleptsov’s room, a cocoon in his dead son’s biscuit tin has opened and a moth emerges and climbs up the wall:

“And its wings – still feeble, still moist – kept growing and unfolding, and now they were developed to the limit set for them by God, and there, on the wall, instead of a little lump of life, instead of a dark mouse, was a great Attacus moth like those that fly, birdlike, around lamps in the Indian dusk.

“And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravishing, almost human happiness.”

And that’s how the story ends. I’m reminded of the final sentence in Nabokov’s 1947 novel, Bend Sinister: “A good night for mothing.” Wisely, Nabokov doesn’t give us Sleptsov’s reaction. In so much of his work, the metaphysical invisibly intersects our quotidian world. Other realities are suggested, never represented. It’s almost Christmas, and a grieving father gets a last gift from his departed son, a gift of unbearable beauty.

In a note, Nabokov tells us he wrote the story (in Russian, “Rozdestvo”) in Berlin, December 1924, and it was published the following month in Rul’ (The Rudder), an émigré newspaper. Two years earlier, Nabokov’s father had been assassinated in Berlin by Russian monarchists. To round out the father-son theme, Nabokov and his son, Dmitri, translated the story into English and it first appeared in Details of a Sunset, in 1975. Two years later, Nabokov was dead, age 78.