'The Folly of Chance is the Logic of Fate'

On my first visit to his new apartment in Silver Springs, Md., my middle son, the family’s newly commissioned Marine, asked me to organize his bookshelves. The volumes fell into self-evident categories: Russian books in the original – Gogol’s Mjórtvyje dúshi – and in translation – War and Peace. Computer engineering, computer science, mathematics. History. Science fiction. Infinite Jest. Michael loaned me three books: 

Dissonant Voices in Soviet Literature (Harper Colophon Books, 1964), edited by Patricia Blake and Max Hayward. I first read this in the late Sixties. It was my introduction to Zamyatin, Shklovsky, Zoshchenko, Paustovsky and possibly Babel.

 

Grey Bees (Maclehose Press, 2020) by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk. In October, Michael met the novelist, who signed (in Russian) his copy on the title page. He was introduced to Kurkov by one of his Russian instructors at the Naval Academy, Catherine O’Neil.

 

Cardinal Points, Issue 11 (2021). This is a bilingual annual literary magazine published by the Slavic studies department of Brown University. Dralyuk serves as editor-in-chief and the other editors are Irinia Mashinski and Robert Chandler. I’ve been reading Cardinal Points online for several  years but this is the first time I have seen a hard copy. On the flight back to Houston I read a free-wheeling essay, “Lying to Ourselves” by Zsuzsa Hetényi, a professor of Russian at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Hetényi is an academic but thoughtful and funny, a wonderful discovery. She was asked questions by a Hungarian literary magazine during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic:

 

“To me the powerful new wave of the literature of memory and life-writing suggests that we’re just putting our old world into a museum for a future that is both terrifying and unknown. Because there is something that’s just about to disappear forever. This is confirmed by  the fact that there is now a massive new wave of Holocaust remembrance, a burgeoning of Facebook groups focused on collecting old photos, retro objects and popular art of the very recent past.”

 

Hetényi is a Nabokov scholar who has translated two of his Russian novels, Mary and Glory, into Hungarian. In the essay she admires the marvelous digression about a pencil in Transparent Things. In the next paragraph she tucks an allusion to Lolita in parentheses: “Evil fate (McFate) has now ensured that everyone must follow a set of rituals. Now everyone practices separation.” She goes on:

 

“The concept of the author I most often cite, Vladimir Nabokov, that death is not a fading away but back into the cosmos and nature, is of little help these days, unless as faith-like self-deception. A great disadvantage of the current disease and of many other forms of death is that death is preceded not only by suffering, but also by the humiliating nature of Hungary’s horrendous hospital and social conditions. Probably this is much scarier and lasts longer than death itself. So this is not the ecstatic poetry of melding back into nature that Russian poets imagine. The sarcasm of Nabokov is far more useful. ‘The folly of chance is the logic of fate.’ Now, that is universal – if somewhat half-empty/half-full, both discouraging and encouraging.”

 

The quoted line is from Nabokov’s short story “A Busy Man” (1931; trans. 1976). Hetényi writes:

 

“Close to my way of thinking is what Nabokov calls cosmic synchronization. This has been over-inflated by philosophically inclined analysts. It means that one can embrace and feel simultaneously several events at several distant points in the world.”

 

Her final Nabokov reference is to one of his best Russian novels, Invitation to a Beheading (1938; trans. 1959). The protagonist, Cincinnatus C., is a prisoner : “[H]e is informed of his death sentence in a completely absurd, petty operetta dictatorship, and then he is merely left to shrivel in prison. But one of Cincinnatus’s selves survives solely because he begins to write in prison (quarantine) diary. The subject of the diary is himself, because ‘no one can take me away from myself.’ Loneliness is the fundamental form of human existence.”