The Prophet of Post-Communism: Vladimir Nabokov and Russian Politics

Vladimir Nabokov was a man ahead of his time in terms of how he thought about Russian politics and society, according to Nina L. Khrushcheva, associate professor, International Affairs Program, New School University. Speaking at a Kennan Institute lecture, Khrushcheva described a way of interpreting Nabokov's novels that allowed one to understand Russia's post-Soviet political transformation and its integration into world markets in a more effective way than simply by studying economics or politics.

In spite of the persistence of its authoritarian political culture, Russia has been able to consistently produce great art, Khrushcheva observed. Because of the existence of an oppressive political reality, however, Russia has never really had a "non-political" literature. For this reason, Nabokov's claims about the non-political nature of his novels—such as Pale Fire, Pnin, and Ada—seem doubtful, Khrushcheva said. To her, Nabokov was clearly a child of the Russian literary tradition, although he inverted it in interesting ways, especially in his focus on the importance of the individual.

For example, Khrushcheva noted, Ada is a rewriting of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with its famous opening lines about happy and sad families inverted to emphasize the variety of happy families rather than their sameness. Pale Fire is a rewriting of Nikolai Gogol's short story Diary of a Madman, and the character of Pnin in the eponymous novel represents a rewrite of the reputation of Chekhov within Russian literature. Pnin was, like Nabokov, an essentially middle class American character who had come from an aristocratic Russian background. He was courageous, persistent, and one of the few characters that Nabokov allowed to be a better person than he himself was.

In Khrushcheva's opinion, Nabokov's "Western" choice came from his own personal circumstances and took him from the closed Russian society of the 19th century to the open society of 20th century America. He was a powerful example of a Russian exile who "made it" in the West, while becoming a giant of both Russian and American literature. Writing in the 1950s, Nabokov re-wrote several classic texts of Russian literature into the Western tradition, with its focus on the individual. In doing so, Khrushcheva said, he was composing Russia's post-Communist fate forty years before it became possible. She concluded by saying that if Russians were ever going to live up to the kind of society they had imagined for themselves in 1991, then they would have to read Nabokov.