'My Soul, Beyond Distant Death"

More than any secular writer I can think of, Vladimir Nabokov hints at the existence of an afterlife. He never preaches and makes no theological assertions. His frequent use of the word “paradise” is often ambiguous, blurring its mundane, metaphorical meaning – an earthly place of happiness and gratification -- with the more traditional notion of a Judeo-Christian heaven. 

Some critics of Pale Fire have suggested that Hazel Shade, who has committed suicide, is the author of the novel’s eponymous poem, not John Shade, her father. Consider the latter's interest in the poem’s I.P.H. – the Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter. Think of the ghostly, acrostic-making author in the short story “The Vane Sisters” and of the unreal reality (a word Nabokov said we should never use without quotations marks) in the novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister. Nabokov writes in his lecture “The Art of Literature and Common Sense”:

 

“That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one’s individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out.”

 

My favorite use of paradise in his work is a casual aside found in “Mademoiselle O,” the memoir/story about his Swiss/French governess that Nabokov wrote and published in French in 1939. He later translated and revised the story and incorporated it into his autobiography, Speak, Memory:

 

“I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.”    

 

Nabokov wrote “In Paradise” in Russian on this date, September 25, in 1927, and published it the following year in the émigré newspaper Rul' (“Rudder”), founded by his father in Berlin. This is his translation:

 

“My soul, beyond distant death

your image I see like this:

a provincial naturalist,

an eccentric lost in paradise.

 

“There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,

a semi-pavonian creature.

Poke at it curiously

with your green umbrella,

 

“speculating how, first of all,

you will write a paper on it

then — But there are no learned journals,

nor any readers in paradise!

 

“And there you stand, not yet believing

your wordless woe.

About that blue somnolent animal

whom will you tell, whom?

 

“Where is the world and the labeled roses,

the museum and the stuffed birds?

And you look and look through your tears

at those unnamable wings.”

 

[“The Art of Literature and Common Sense” is collected in Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Bowers, 1980).]