'The Only General Definition I Will Allow Myself'

Among Russian émigrés in Berlin, the night of January 13-14, 1928, was New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day, Old Style, according to the Julian calendar. Russians take the coming of the new year seriously. Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) is their Santa Claus analog. With his granddaughter, Snegurochka (the Snow Maiden), he dispenses presents. On that night ninety-four years ago, Vladimir Nabokov delivered a lecture, “Man and Things,” to the literary circle formed around Yuly Aykhenvald (who had been killed a month earlier in a tram accident) and Raisa Tatarinov. 

Nabokov detested general ideas, abstractions, theories. He would later urge his Cornell students to “caress the details, the divine details.” He is already sounding the theme, playfully, in his New Year’s lecture: “For by the word ‘thing’ I mean not only a toothpick but also a steam engine. Everything made by human hands is a thing. That is the only general definition I will allow myself.”

 

His lecture, too, is a made thing, a pleasing, inspired metaphor machine: “An inkwell stares at me with one black eye, with a glint in its pupil. A clock whose hands are at ten to two brings to mind a face with Wilhelm’s whiskers. Between the rounded bell-glass of a lamp and the bald head of a philosopher filled with luminous thought, there is a soothing resemblance.” Everything reminds him of something else. Nabokov’s imagination ceaselessly animates the world. Nothing is inert:

 

“In villages in the Schwarzwald, there are sneering houses: the little window in the roof is elongated like a sly eye. Automobiles, too, can be extremely eyelike, the more so because we give them not three, not one, but two headlights. Little wonder that in our fairy tales and in our spiritualist séances things literally come to life.”

 

Nabokov was then working on his second novel, King, Queen, Knave (1928; trans. by the author and Dmitri Nabokov, 1968). He had recently published “Christmas,” a short story in which Sleptsov has returned to his country manor from Petersburg for the funeral of his son. His despair is crushing. 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. . .”

 

Nabokov then 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.”

 

In the final paragraph of his lecture Nabokov writes: “A thing is a human likeness, and sensing this likeness, its death, its destruction, is unbearable for us.”

 

[The lecture is collected in Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]