EFTA01137077.pdf

"The Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science": Nabokov, Stravinsky, and the Reader as Listener. Leon Botstein Parallel Lives In his meticulously prepared compendium of interviews, Strong Opinions, Nabokov, reprinted a 1970 response to a question posed by Alfred Appel about whether he knew Igor Stravinsky, "another outspoken émigré." Vladimir Nabokov replied, "I know Mr. Stravinsky very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print." Nabokov's revealed an uncanny but not unexpected doubt about Stravinsky's role in the authorship of the (by then) extensive accumulation of Stravinsky-Craft volumes of conversations. The questions of who was responsible for what appeared in print, and what Robert Craft's role actually was, remain a matter of controversy? Craft's contribution was, if not decisive, then certainly substantial. He confessed to Stephen Walsh, with pride, that one reviewer of the 1959 Conversations expressed the opinion that "the two finest writers of English prose" were Russians: Nabokov and Stravinsky.3 It was the idea that Stravinsky was considered a "fine writer" that surely irritated Nabokov. Such a notion revealed a familiar philistinism and stupidity, not entirely unrelated to the evils of poshlose, Nabokov's term for the fake suggestion of genuine art, refinement and judgment so rampant in so called civilized society. 4 Nabokov's subtly worded skepticism about the authorship of the volumes anticipated what has remained for scholars a source of ambiguity with respect to understanding Stravinsky, particularly in his American years. It seems that everything Stravinsky published, from his An Autobiography of 1935 and 1936 to the 1939 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, was, if not ghost-written, then the work of close collaboration.s This does not disqualify the utility of what was published by Stravinsky as sources for understanding Stravinsky. But there are no grounds for elevating the composer to the stature of Nabokov as a writer.6 Nabokov's aside about Stravinsky needs to be read as well within the context of Nabokov's persistent comments regarding his own weak relationship to music. Even if we accept Nabokov's humorous descriptions of his imperviousness to music, the contact between these two prominent émigrés from prerevolutionary St. Petersburg was, as many have noted, nonetheless unexpectedly minimal in the American exile they shared! They appear to have barely known one another. Stravinsky seems not to have read Nabokov, either during the 1930s, in Russian, or in English in the 1950s and 1960s. After 1940 Nabokov took pains to protest his lack of musicality, even though he took ironic pride in being a descendant of Carl Heinrich Graun (a minor but well regarded 18th century composer). And his only son, Dimitri, became an opera singer: "1 have no ear for music—a shortcoming I deplore bitterly," he confessed in a 1964 Playboy interview.s Nabokov admitted to retaining a memory of unwanted attendance at operas during his childhood and having once translated EFTA01137077 Schubert song texts into Russian, but the art of music, officially, was foreign to him. "Music, I am afraid to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds," he wrote in Speak, Memory. In 1969 he quipped, in order to underscore his distance from most modern poetry: "I know as little about today's poetry as about new music."9 Nonetheless, Appel, one of the first and most respected of Nabokov scholars, suggested in 1967 the idea (now increasingly supported in the critical literature) that true to his sly and devious nature, Nabokov was perhaps protesting too much about his lack of connection to music.° In fact, as Appel argued, Nabokov's obsessions with memory, consciousness, time, and the structure of the novel all took on explicit musical metaphors and analogies, suggesting that Nabokov, by dismissing his connection to music, was following a time-honored tradition of intentionally throwing his would-be interpreters off, if only to separate fools from knaves in search of a single knight. Stravinsky was, by all accounts, an avid reader. But he seems to have taken no interest in Nabokov the writer, in either Russian or English. The absence of any real contact between himself and Nabokov, both of whom arrived in America from France within two years of one another and shared common cultural and historical origins, is further remarkable, given the tight interconnections (so vividly described in Pnin) within Russian émigré circles. True, Nabokov resided in the East, and Stravinsky on the West Coast, until the mid 1960s, when he was already quite ill. But they seem also never to have met in Berlin or Paris, where both found themselves with some frequency, and in contact with Russian émigrés in those cities. The two men even had one significant friend in common, perhaps the only person to be in attendance at both funerals of Stravinsky and Nabokov, Nicolas Nabokov, the composer and controversial cultural impresario. Nicolas was a first cousin of the writer, whose help to Nabokov extended to arranging lodgings (his ex-wife provided Vladimir and Vera Nabokov with their first home in America in 1940), and with whom Vladimir was in intermittent social contact until his death." Nicolas, whom Stravinsky knew from his Paris years, was among those closest to Stravinsky throughout the American years, and worked hard to promote his music in the 1950s. 12Bringing Nabokov and Stravinsky together would have been easy. It appears that they may actually have avoided one another.13 By the mere fact of shared birthplace and common exile—first in Europe and then America—the act of considering them together possesses a basic historical logic. There are obvious parallels in their lives, as well as key divergences below any surface similarities that help explain the absence of contact. Despite the social distance between the two, when one compares their careers and work, striking connections emerge between Stravinsky's music and Nabokov's prose. They shared parallel premises and prejudices in their views on art. And their respective places in the history of modernism bear comparison. Upon closer inspection, the contrasts in biography stand out. The writer was seventeen years younger. Nabokov was born into a family of high aristocracy and EFTA01137078 great wealth. Stravinsky, in contrast, descended from petty aristocracy.14 He did his best to assert his aristocratic origins and prized his provenance of privilege and exclusivity, but the social gulf between them was marked. In their American years, Nabokov seems never to have complained about his loss of status and wealth and did not try to impress Americans with his ancestry. Stravinsky, in contrast, exaggerated his vanished social distinction and was notoriously obsessed about money.15 Both men had famous fathers, but Vladimir Nabokov idealized and idolized his father whereas Igor Stravinsky seems only to have harbored resentment against his distinguished father, Russia's finest operatic bass before Feodor Chaliapin.1° Nabokov's parents, music lovers, were in the patron class. Chaliapin and Serge Koussevitzky performed in the Nabokov home, and perhaps so too did Igor's father.17 Both the writer and the composer spent the interwar years in exile in Europe. Both lived at one time in Switzerland, for which they had a particular fondness. Stravinsky spent most of the years between 1917 and 1939 in France, whereas Nabokov chose Berlin. In Berlin Nabokov kept close to the Russian émigré community. Stravinsky had many Russian friends and colleagues in France, but he became a French citizen and emerged by the 1930s as the leading and most influential composer among the French. Ironically, from childhood, Stravinsky's best foreign language had been German. His French developed slowly, despite his many years in France and in French-speaking Switzerland. Nabokov (for whom English was a childhood language and his second language) preferred French, his years in Berlin notwithstanding, even though he wrote most of his early novels in Germany. He read German and spoke it, but never used it as a language of writing. Stravinsky shifted from an initial hostility to the German cultural tradition in music to an increasing admiration and emulation of it as normative.18 He never could quite accommodate Wagner, but in his later years Beethoven and Schubert became important to him in a manner they had not been early in his career. By the mid- 1930s he was most eager, despite the Nazi seizure of power, to gain acceptance in Germany. Nabokov never much liked things German, except for scientific works. His novels—particularly from the early ones to the last from that period, especially King, Queen, Knave, and The Gift—are peppered with contempt and parody of German habits and culture. The German came to be emblematic of the worst of pseudo-culture. They were the prime purveyors of a particularly pretentious tradition of poshlost'.1° Nabokov, like his father, was an ardent foe of anti-Semitism. He despised not only the Nazi variety, but also the anti-Semitism so commonplace within the Russian intelligentsia. Nabokov hated the fascists, and indeed all tyranny. The same cannot be said of Stravinsky. Stravinsky admired Mussolini; he was annoyed only that II Duce had no time for him in 1936.2° The text of Stravinsky's 1939 Norton Lectures, The Poetics ofMusic, is marked by an obsessive assertion of the dangerous threat that the centrality of "the stern auspices of order and discipline" in modern life and art were being neglected. Stravinsky declared, "Modern man is progressively losing his understanding of values and his sense of proportion." This was "serious" since it EFTA01137079 challenged the "fundamental laws of human equilibrium." Whether intentionally or not Stravinsky evoked the pseudo-historical justification of fascism as the proper antidote to chaos and degeneracy peddled by purveyors of fascist ideology. Stravinsky thought that the errors of contemporary culture unmasked the fact that "the mind itself is ailing." Much of the music of the time, Stravinsky told his audience, "carries within it the symptoms of a pathologic blemish and the germs of a new original sin."2I His rhetoric possessed an uncanny and perhaps unintended family resemblance to the aesthetics favored by fascist regimes that defined "degenerate art". Despite Stravinsky's unambiguous dislike of the Soviets in the 1930s, the Eurasiansim he subscribed to led him to a critical skepticism in 1939 more implicitly consonant with the Stalinist dogma of the mid- and late 1930s that ostracized Dimitri Shostakovich and Gavril Popov, despite the latter's attack on formalism than he might have wished. The criticisms shared a tone of moral disapproval. Not surprisingly, Stravinsky pointedly developed, in exile, an overt commitment to religion, in particular Russian Orthodoxy. And by the mid-1920s he assumed a stark anti-modernist stance under the guise of neoclassicism, even though he had no use for socialist realism. But Stravinsky's problem with Russia under communism was comparatively nuanced. During the years he flirted with Eurasianist notions, Stravinsky observed, "Now Russia has seen only conservatism, without renewal or revolution without tradition".22 Nabokov shared none of this. Organized traditional religion remained foreign to him. He maintained the same strict and unwavering contempt for post-revolutionary Russia, the Soviets, as he did for the fascists. He kept his distance from all "isms". His views on human history and progress were rather closely linked to his own lifelong encounter with the detailed scientific observation of nature. Individuality and freedom in art and thought were endangered by the politics and culture of modern times. In 1937 Nabokov wrote, "the symmetry in the structure of live bodies is a consequence of the rotation of worlds ... and that in our straining toward asymmetry, toward inequality, I can detect a howl for genuine freedom, an urge to break out of the circle."23 For all his snobbery about writers past and present, Nabokov never strayed away from the modernism he came to admire early in his career, that of Andrey Bely, Franz Kafka, the Proust ofSwann's Way, and the Joyce of Ulysses.24 Although both men were anti-communist, Nabokov's pessimism about modernity never led him down the more reactionary path taken by Stravinsky in the years between 1922 and the mid-1950s. Nabokov feared the populist embrace of the despotic imposition of order and discipline in political life from below—including the sort of uniform assertion of a "healthy" social utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Hitler and Stalin. He also did not romanticize autocracy, including that of the Czars before 1917. The trap Nabokov's protagonist in Bend Sinister, Adam Krug, faces is the futility and self-destructiveness of any struggle to hold on to any shred of individuality, genuine refinement, originality, and morality, particularly through the engagement with language, thought, literature, and culture, in the context of modern dictatorship. The pretense of value on behalf culture and the making of art itself are EFTA01137080 complicit in concealing this trap, as Ember, Krug's friend in Bend Sinister, the Shakespeare translator, grasps. The cult of self-improving culture displayed by Dolores Haze in Lolita (consider the meaning of the name itself), and the sort of bad art associated with middle-class, semi-educated taste for the sentimental and the emotionally illustrative provide absolutely no protection against barbarism and violence. Humbert Humbert's highly cultivated and persuasive tastes in literature, music, and art, his evident superiority in terms of learning over the Americans he meets seduces the reader; Humbert's aesthetic sensibility, even his capacity for poetic eloquence, renders his case for his own defense hard to resist. Connoisseurship does not prevent his crimes. It merely softens the cruelty and deepens the plausibility of rationalization. Whether delivered by would-be individualists like Humbert or bureaucrats and dictators who create concentration camps, aesthetic gifts and cultural sensibilities fail, in modern life, for Nabokov, as antidotes to evil.25 When Humbert Humbert chases Clare Quilty, attempting to shoot him, his victim "sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman's chest near the piano."26 Nabokov could not have evoked a more effective caricature of the pretentions of the modern piano virtuoso and the cheap, illustrative romanticism of precisely the kind Stravinsky despised, and the futility of a tradition of the consumption of culture as means of escape (the seaman's chest) from a fatal barbarism that threatens the survival of morality, civility, and the humane, much less talent, originality, beauty, and learning. For Nabokov, the Russia of his youth was personal; it vanished and lived only in his memory. The pretense of a legitimate basis in the past for nostalgia held no allure. In his adult life Nabokov remained resistant to organized causes and ideologies, including patriotism and cultural chauvinism. Although Russian was his primary language, the Russia that continued to occupy him was his invention and bore little, if any relation to the Russia that existed after 1917. Stravinsky nonetheless held on to the idea of an ongoing residual national solidarity, even though he rejected any narrow nationalism. He saw himself as a supranational, universal figure above politics. Yet he subordinated his distaste for communism and joined with other émigrés in taking some pride in the Soviet part of the Allied war effort in the 1940s. Stravinsky may have been quite ambivalent about returning to Russia, but he calculated correctly that if he did, he would return in triumph, which is what happened in 1962 after an absence of fifty years. He embraced the Russia he encountered on that trip; it evoked not only nostalgia but also a renewed sense of connection. Nabokov never sought to return to Russia or to maneuver to gain access to readers in Soviet Russia. EFTA01137081 Stravinsky rose to fame in 1913 with The Rite of Spring not as an exile, but as a Russian composer on a voluntary temporary sojourn from Russia, the sort of visit to the West commonplace in the history of Russian music and literature, an experience shared by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Skryabin, and Ivan Turgenev. In contrast, Nabokov's great fame occurred in the context of involuntary exile. He always resented comparison with Joseph Conrad. Conrad was not an exile. He had no career as a Polish writer. Nabokov, a respected writer of Russian poetry and prose, became later in life a writer in English. Like Conrad, Nabokov achieved worldwide fame as a writer in English. But Nabokov did so while maintaining an explicit commitment to a particular tradition of Russian literature. His harsh loyalty to the virtue of literal translation (and skepticism about any other sort) was rooted in a view of the indivisible uniqueness of language. Its meanings were contingent on specificity, on time and place. In the end however, Nabokov's origins as a Russian did not define him in America, despite his teaching of Russian language and literature in a manner that suggested an indisputable superior knowledge and authority. Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire made him famous—all novels located in America. In Stravinsky's case, the explicitly Russian aspects of his music, no matter how subtly altered and camouflaged, never disappeared and actually helped shape his finest music written in America. Indeed, the role Stravinsky, already a lionized personality, played in French musical life—he influenced decisively the direction of French music between the early 1920s and 1940—was analogous to the place Nabokov came to occupy as writer in America from the late 1950s until his death in 1977. Nabokov's 1913 occurred in 1956 with the publication of Lolita. Both artists experienced—at different stages of their careers—a sudden burst of worldwide notoriety through scandal associated with a single work. Stravinsky became world famous at age 30. He arrived in America a well-known, influential, and admired figure, which led to the invitation to give the prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard. Stravinsky complained constantly about money, but he came to America without any of the sort of dire financial worries common among émigrés (consider the fate of Alexander Zemlinsky who died in penury and obscurity in 1942 in Larchmont New York). When Nabokov arrived in 1940, he brought with him at best an obscure reputation limited to émigré circles. He was in desperate straits. Among those prepared to help him were Serge Rachmaninoff, and Serge Koussevitzky, who provided the affidavit. Nabokov's rise to the status of a superstar came when he was in his late fifties. As with Stravinsky and The Rite, what made Nabokov famous was more the surface of a single work, Lolita, rather than what the critical consensus would ultimately identify as the work's greatness and importance. In the case of The Rite, it was the choreography and the spectacular orchestral sonorities and effects that generated the scandal. In the case of Lolita, the predictably reductive account of the plot, the overt subject of the novel—the sexual passion for a "nymphet"—and not its language and structure or its many tantalizing asides, made the writer rich and famous. EFTA01137082 Stravinsky came to America as a Russian composer known for his prominence in French musical life, in part through the proselytizing of Nadia Boulanger, with whom Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and many others had studied. These identities he retained. Nevertheless, Stravinsky, like Nabokov, faced the problem of how to establish himself in America. Robert Craft was central to this process and helped reinvent the composer's image and propel him into the American scene of music and letters as an icon. Stravinsky's disappointment at the reception in 1951 of the opera The Rake's Progress, a work that many have regarded the culmination of the composer's romance with the "order and discipline" of neoclassicism— understood strictly as evocative of eighteenth-century practices—motivated him to explore serialism, with Craft's help and Ernst Krenek's guidance. Stravinsky was always keenly attuned to the winds of fashion and the reception of his own music. The major works of his final serial period, along with Craft's deft handling of the composer as a personality, helped place the composer into the center of American classical musical life. Craft's role made the output of new music possible. Yet even in the face of a remarkable late period, it was the music written before the American years that defined the composer's public persona to the end of his life. Nabokov did not have a past visible to his new American public. But he did not require a Craft to assist him. Yet, as Nabokov freely admitted, without Edmund Wilson, his entry into the American literary world would certainly have been even more difficult than it turned out to be. However, Nabokov achieved his own carefully crafted iconic status as an American writer in the end through the works he wrote in English. The supposed poetic masterpiece around which Pale Fire is constructed is evidence of Nabokov's deep immersion into American life and letters. Nabokov's Russian novels gained a wide reading public only in retrospect—a pattern between old and new work that was the exact reverse of Stravinsky. Nabokov used his American success to withdraw, albeit only in part, from America. Living in Montreux for his final sixteen years, he continued to assert his affection and allegiance to America; he maintained his prominence in the world of letters from afar and continued to write in English. "I am trying to develop, in this rosy exile, the same fertile nostalgia in regard to America, my new country as I evolved for Russia, my old one..."27 His move was only in a minor way a move "back." It ought not be compared to the return to Europe of Thomas Mann, Theodor W. Adorno, or Paul Hindemith—none of whom ever considered America a plausible second home. Craft may have briefly considered getting Stravinsky to move back to Switzerland in the 1960s, but Stravinsky never truly considered returning to Europe after 1945. When he decided to leave the West Coast in the 1960s, he settled in New York. He managed, like Nabokov, to balance his own construct of a lost homeland with affection for his new American home. In the end, however he was buried in Venice, near Diaghilev. Method and Influence EFTA01137083 Richard Taruskin, in his brilliant, definitive and exhaustive two-volume account of Stravinsky's career through to the composition of Mavra in 1922—with its epilogue on the composer's final masterpiece, the 1964 Requiem Canticles—has painstakingly and persuasively described the defining early phases of the composer's career.28 These phases, with their engagement with Russian traditions and contemporaries shaped the composer's method and aesthetic. Stravinsky's music, from the 1920s to the 1960s reveals a lasting debt to Russian sources, to the Russian context in which he came of age, and the manner in which he transformed Russian elements in the first years of exile in Switzerland?' Fireworks and The Firebird display the young composer's initial debt to a late nineteenth-century aesthetic, an older romantic nationalism, in which folklore was adapted into music for the stage and domestic use—the "kuchkist" heritage of the so-called Mighty Five. Stravinsky (as his comments on Tchaikovsky suggest) also sought to prove himself within the Rimsky circle based on his command of the craft of composition defined in the German centered "Western European" terms of Glazunov's more conservative formalist achievement. That craft involved the display of symphonic thinking, in which a dynamic, if not a self-declared organic logic drives the use and transformation of harmony and melody. Harmony serves a functional purpose in shaping musical time and structure, providing a process of thematic transformation, development, and recapitulation. These generate audience expectations and the mechanisms by which instrumental music mimics narrative patterns in prose; these strategies made it possible for composers successfully to occupy duration and recalibrate long stretches of time. With its nationalist colorings, the Russian music of the 1880s and '90s—Stravinsky's initial formative aesthetic environment—can be taken as the musical equivalents of the literary realism that dominated Russian literature, if not into the early 1900s, then, at a minimum, until the mid-1880s, after the death of Tsar Alexander IP° Social and political content and plainness in narrative and plot structure dominated. Matters of style, the self-conscious awareness of form, or any pretense to rendering prose closer to the poetic were subordinated. Literature, notably in the case of Dostoevsky and the later Tolstoy, became a prose forum for ideas—mostly on behalf of social and political changes that could elevate the moral significance and worth of all human beings. The method and form were contingent on the ideal of realism. The spiritual betterment of the reader became a goal. Ideas were rendered through action, description, and dialogue. The reader was drawn in by the writer's manipulation of the illusions of sequential time and pictorial realism. Not surprisingly, then, among Nabokov's father's favorite novelists was none other than Charles Dickens. Although Nabokov was considerably younger than Stravinsky, they both confronted these qualities, colored by nationalist sentiment, as the dominant aesthetic credo of their parental generation, of the late nineteenth century. Whether in prose or in music, the objective was to master the suggestion and evocation, through aesthetic conventions, of content whose plausibility was located in methods of persuasion EFTA01137084 tied to realist criteria in which the experience of the artwork in some manner modeled itself along the lines of the experience of reality. Stravinsky, even when he abandoned the Rimsky model, sustained a nationalist impetus by drawing on more ethnographically authentic sources of Russian folk music. But he located new formal possibilities for music and at the same time articulated a nationalist sensibility less defined by the aesthetics of romanticism and at once more novel, and authentic. His means deviated from the program music tradition and were influenced by the ideas of contemporaries, several who were linked to the "World of Art" circle—Sergei Diaghilev, Leon Bakst, and Alexandre Benois in particular. The last two were themselves part of the circle of artists around the Nabokov family. The vogue for symbolism and synesthesia, particularly in the work of Bely and Skryabin, also played a role in shaping the path Stravinsky took. In The Rite, Stravinsky used abstraction of the archaic Russian materials he appropriated to achieve an "architectural" rather than "anecdotal" use of musical time. Repetition in the form of sustained rhythmic pulsation was juxtaposed with abrupt harmonic shifts and changes in sonority at odds with the tradition of the symphony. The combinatorial ingenuity (meant here not strictly in the sense defined by Milton Babbitt) Stravinsky revealed employed the octatonic scale and intervallic cells—"a syntax of subsets and super-sets" derived from it.3I With that as a base he pursued intentional "simplification"—all abstractions of genuine folk melodic and rhythmic usage. This led Stravinsky to achieve what Taruskin describes as "a hard nosed esthetic modernism."32 Harmony was no longer directional and dynamic, but static. The effect was not unlike the visual aesthetic pursued Nicholas Roerich, the designer of the first Rite production. Roerich, working from the suggestion of authentic national antique sources, produced flat, static, frozen imagery further abstracted from any form of realism by the stark uninflected use of color and the reduction of perspective in which juxtaposed geometric patterns in the visual frame undercut the nominal suggestion of narrative meaning in favor of formal properties of color and line.33 Stravinsky, by The Rite and certainly by the early 1920s, had shifted the relationship of the listener to the musical work away from any analogy to that of a reader, distancing the experience of musical time from being analogous to the act of reading and following a narrative. The plausibility of an imagined past, present and future, occurring in a logical sequence as in the realist novel, opera, and romantic symphony had been enhanced by the realist plainness (or naturalistic resemblance) of prose style (including dialogue) and the manipulation of the narrative voice in these genres. These expectations of readers had been amply met by the techniques of musical usage, in the orchestral and operatic output of both sides of the apparent divide between the circles around Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. But with The Rite, anticipation and release as well as recollection during the act of listening were subordinated to the intensity of the momentary encounter with sound and the unprepared contrasts in the sequence of events. Music intensified the experience of time in the immediacy of its encounter, emancipating it from any dependence on recapitulation and foregrounding accumulation. Abstraction led the listener away EFTA01137085 from the narrative conventions in the use of music derived from the literary characteristic of opera and late nineteenth-century symphonic writing. Stravinsky's Rite appeared in direct conflict with musical realism's most skilled practitioner of the fin de siècle, Richard Strauss, notably his two last symphonic works, the Sinfonia domestica and the Alpine Symphony. However fierce the antipathy may have been between the "kuchkists" and their opponents, as can be said of the tension between Wagnerians and anti-Wagnerians (acolytes of Brahms), the advent of modernism circa 1913 in Stravinsky unmasked what these separate camps actually held in common in terms of the function of harmony and the character of form, and therefore the construct of musical time. Whether formalist (in the sense of Eduard Hanslick and later Stravinsky himself, who in his autobiography never tired of underscoring the idea that music expressed nothing except itself), or blatantly illustrative, as in Wagner, Liszt, and Strauss, time had been, by convention, controlled so as to confirm the apparent reality of a past and present moment, and the existence of a causal nexus analogous to the empirical experience of events. Art sought to engender either a remembered, imagined, or implied narrative.34 Stravinsky's achievement in the 1913 Rite and more strikingly in 1917 with Les Noces—his distillation of a modernist aesthetic out of neo-nationalist material using simplification and abstraction that recalibrated the experience of time and defined a style—can be compared with the project that Nabokov undertook as a novelist in his twenties, after his years at Cambridge, and his move to Berlin. Nabokov shared sources of inspiration with his older composer compatriot, notably the "World of Art" movement that argued the autonomy of the aesthetic, and the primacy of matters of style, and form, all against the inherited utilitarian aesthetics of realism. Both symbolism and the "World of Art" motivated Stravinsky and Nabokov to question the claim of a correspondence between the aesthetic experience and the quotidian encounter with experienced time, both measured and remembered. This challenge to the traditional logic of art extended to a critique of the late Tolstoy's insistence that there be an evident moral and, by implication, redemptive justification beyond the aesthetic. Stravinsky and Nabokov experimented not only in terms of their engagement with their respective traditions in Russian music and literature, but in terms of the fundamental character, function and purpose of the work of art and its relationship to its audience, the link between literature and reader and music and listener. The Gift, Nabokov's last novel from his Berlin years (and for some his finest) is in part framed by two exchanges between the two most sympathetic figures in the book: Fyodor, the nominal protagonist, who writes a satirical, almost Gogol-like biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky (the arch realist of the nineteenth century and a favorite of Lenin and the Soviets), and Koncheyev, the poet. In the first exchange Fyodor asserts, quoting Koncheyev, "Yes, some day I'm going to produce prose in which 'thought and music are conjoined as are the folds of life in sleep.'"3s Thinking in words is idealized by language's musical properties—its sounds and rhythms— EFTA01137086 not meanings that might be detached from form. For the young Nabokov, the writing of literature was framed by language that revealed a temporal logic outside of ordinary time, comparable to the distortion of time in dreams, yet possessed of a precision reminiscent of the exactness of science. In the second exchange Fyodor picks up this theme (one which Nabokov would return to explicitly at the end of Ada, or Ardor): It would be a good thing in general to put an end to our barbaric perception of time.... Our mistaken feeling of time as a kind of growth is a consequence of our finiteness which, being always on the level of the present, implies a constant rise between the watery abyss of the past and the aerial abyss of the future. Existence is thus an eternal transformation of the future into the past- an essentially phantom process—a mere reflection of the material metamorphoses taking place within us.... The theory I find most tempting— that there is no time, that everything is the present situated like a radiance outside our blindness—is just as hopeless a finite hypothesis as all the others.36 Nabokov's attraction to finding the "radiance outside our blindness" was located in his attempt, as a writer of prose that treated language as music—in the service of a poetic prose—to shatter the inherited narrative and structural conventions of the novelistic form developed during the heyday of realism and to locate an alternate sensibility that transcended the mundane. This project—despite the evident contrasts—took shape in a manner comparable to Stravinsky's evolution from the 1907 Symphony in E-flat to the 1917 Les Noces. Nabokov experimented not only with language at every point in a novel (or short story) each unit of which was ultimately contained on index cards, but the overall structure, routinely divorcing each novel from following an inherited model as a sequential narrative marked by character development. By rejecting the symphonic model—the conventions of late nineteenth-century musical continuity—Stravinsky formed what Edward T. Cone identified as a "method," an alternative to shaping musical time. Cone described the method in three parts: stratification, interlock, and synthesis.37 These three terms could be applied to Nabokov's novels from the 1930s, particularly The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading, and those from the 1950s, particularly Lolita and Pnin. The privileging of the aesthetic pioneered by the "World of Art" movement and the symbolists of the Silver Age in Russia offered both Stravinsky and Nabokov the ideological bases for shifting the criteria of an artwork from matters of content to those of form. Within formal criteria, style and method were foregrounded. Cone identified the use of successive "time-segments" in the 1920 Symphonies of Wind Instruments.38 Each of these is suspended, creating opportunities for their employment in contrapuntal usage. The synthesis comes not in a climax, but in the reduction or the assimilation of one element into another. Bridges and divergences are common. Stratification using discrete musical variables defines Stravinsky's compositional procedure well into the music of the 1940s; it, in Cone's view, also EFTA01137087 describes the way in which the strong tonal components of the 1930 Symphony of Psalms are organized. Another way of imagining Stravinsky's method in the Wind Symphonies is, as Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schonberger have argued, to apply the metaphors of montage and collage in which the structural relationship and identity of disparate fragments is altered and manipulated, generating an overarching unified framework in which the discrete elements remain visible.39 Taruskin has perhaps the most elaborate and persuasive way of characterizing Stravinsky's novel approach to form through the use of the Russian term drobnost' to describe it 40 The parallels in Nabokov to such procedures are found in the fragmentation of time, the subtly arranged but sudden shifts in voice and in the inconsistent presence of the narrator. Nabokov's "time fragments" are deployed so as to create ambiguities between the real and imagined. The reader is continually alert to the persistent shedding of the illusions of realist narration; just as the listener to Stravinsky is struck by the distinct substance of each musical moment apart from any functional implication backward or forward, Nabokov's reader is forced to confront sentences and paragraphs as stylistic entities with significance apart from any overarching narrative frame. Literature, insofar as it is part of "the forces of imagination" is a "force[s] of good" Nabokov observed in 1965. Translating The Eye more than three decades after its publication, Nabokov confessed he was in search of the "reader who catches on at first"; this reader will derive "genuine satisfaction," but from more than a story.41 Nabokov's ideal reader is asked to jettison the common sense notion of language as representational or corresponding to an external reality. A different sort of precision is required. Stylistic self-awareness of observation alters the perception of elapsed time and preserves it in memory. The more detailed, the more unusual and poetic, the more vivid. Through writing fired by the poetic imagination a new reality comes into being more real than the so-called "real" itself. The frames of the novels—visible in the cloaked identity of the narrator in Pnin, the construction of Pale Fire out of segments of commentary that follow a text and scramble past, present and future and the multiple identities of its protagonist Kinbote, the form of Lolita as an account by a man awaiting trial, or the uncertain connection to dream life and everyday existence in Despair,Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister—suggest parallels to Stravinsky's procedures of stratifying elements that have been abstracted from otherwise familiar patterns. In music, pitch and rhythm are the elements in play; in prose they are words, plot, time, and character. It is in the dimension of the use of time that collage and montage most easily fit Nabokov's method, his layering of perspectives using fragments of memory and distortions of sequential time42 Nabokov's syntactic inventiveness, his virtuosic use and invention of words, his nearly Shakespearean synthesis of word use and thought, as well as his assemblage of the novel by the ordering of completed units (his beloved index cards) render Nabokov's method not dissimilar from musical composition as practiced by Stravinsky. Stravinsky's meticulous habits in the process of composition, evident (to cite just two often reproduced examples) in the manuscripts of The Rake's Progress and the Requiem EFTA01137088 Canticles and as understood by theorists, support metaphors that suggest an innovative combinatorial ingenuity shared by Nabokov and Stravinsky.43 Consider, for example, the elegance, variety and ingenuity in the disposition of intervals and sonorities in the Requiem Canticles as analogous to the illusory simplicity of the relationship of poem to commentary in Pale Fire. Kinbote, with knowing irony, speaks early of that one line that "would have completed the symmetry" of Shade's poem. Nabokov has him end this thought by writing "damn that music. Knowing Shade's combinatorial turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predicable growth."44 Deformation precisely describes what he as a novelist and Stravinsky as composer, in their relationship to the traditions in their respective arenas, actually accomplished. The deformation and meddling were directed at the narrative conventions of form and continuity. Nabokov was fabled for his visual acuity. His love of Sherlock Holmes rested less in the detective's deductive powers than his eye for detail. Nabokov's meticulous work on butterflies, his fanatical concern for the accuracy of descriptive detail, his poetic response to landscape in his novels all attest to the primacy of observation of and attention to the smallest detail in a work of art and the imagination. "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."45 No wonder he derided novelists of "general" ideas who penned prosaic sentences filled with the vocabulary of abstraction. In Speak, Memory Nabokov pointed to the moment of intense sight as the means by which the finest in the human can stake its claim: It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower." In Nabokov's writing, the aural experience in the present moment, not only the visual, mirrors "the heightened terrace of consciousness" that can be set to words. At stake is not a talent for synesthesia (as with Mikalojus tiurlionis) or its ideology (as with Skryabin).47 Nabokov did, however, recall that the imagining of the outline of a single letter of the alphabet produced a "fine case of colored hearing."48 But Nabokov's memories were framed by sounds—a "throbbing tambourine," "trilling" nightingales, the sounds of village musicians, the rhythm of Mademoiselle's speech.49 King Charles in Pale Fire was a musician. Nabokov routinely praised poetry in terms of music (its "contrapuntal pyrotechnics"), and for its music, ("that dim distant music").se Cincinnatus C. recalls the world being "hacked" into "great gleaming blocks" by the "music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte."51 Indeed, for Nabokov, the power of music and of sound—for all the links to memory—was that it intensified the ordinary consciousness of time understood as a EFTA01137089 continuum along the lines of the quotidian.52 The short story "Music" revolves around the perception that music easily links present with past.53 At the same time Nabokov grasped the need to deviate from a sense of time located in nature. Music as an art, like poetry, could expand time. Kinbote, defending his friendship with Shade, credited his short acquaintance with the capacity to defy the calendar, creating "inner duration," "eons of transparent time" independent of "rotating malicious music."54 Nabokov's view is not entirely dissimilar to Stravinsky's. The composer wrote in his autobiography, "Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present." Music's sole purpose was to establish "an order in things" and especially "the coordination between man and time." Music redefines time in the present and gives "substance" and "stability" to "the category of the present."ss Despite the surface of divergence between the two—Nabokov's struggle against the tyranny of a seemingly objective and uniform construct of time, and Stravinsky's ambition to deepen the sense of the present through musical construction—both shared an obsession with how the aesthetic realm might influence the phenomenon of time perception. Nostalgia and memory for both were tied to the experience of time. And both drew, in their various speculations, on two common sources: Henri Bergson and Andrey Bely. Writing about Stravinsky in 1949, Craft mentions Stravinsky's having read Bergson.56 Whether he actually did so or learned of Bergson's ideas from Pierre Souvchinsky and Paul Valery in the 1920s, the philosophical connection Bergson forged between the experience of time in the present and the expression of the human creative force left a lasting impression on the composer's beliefs about the character and function of music.57 Music, by framing and in fact stopping the ordinary experience of time so that it appeared always in the present, rendered music "petrified" architecture and deepened the consciousness of human creativity. Nabokov had a more complex understanding of time. He was also influenced by Bergson, whom he admitted reading avidly in the interwar years.s8 But the issue of time, always present in the novels, took center stage in the 1960s, in Ada. In Stravinsky, musical time as defined as the extension and construction of the present moment, reappears as well in the late work, mostly as a result of his encounter with the music of Anton von Webern, in which silence as a component of music structure and the ascetic economic manipulation of sonority, mostly in units of short duration, predominates, thereby heightening and intensifying the sense of time. The overlap between Stravinsky and Nabokov rests in their respective struggles to come to terms with the link between past and present The "flowering of the present," as Van Veen, in Ada, put it, demanded the awareness that time is "vaguely connected to hearing"; the apprehension of time requires "the utmost purity of consciousness," which is not spatial and visual but aural.59 The key fact is that the "still fresh past" defines the present. The "present" slips in when we inspect "shadow sounds." The "dim" intervals between the "dark" beats of the authentic rhythm of time" offer merely the "feel" of the texture of time. Nabokov concluded: "Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and EFTA01137090 actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the nowness."6° The synchronized flow of time as measured by clocks was itself an illusion, since the boundaries between past and present were if not fluid, interdependent, with the selective consciousness of the past defining the present and then subsequently, the reverse, in which the past becomes circumscribed by the sense of the present moment6I This fluidity reveals itself in the movement back and forth in time in Nabokov's narrative voice. His characters take the same journey — often so deftly from the reader's perspective that the shifts become noticeable only after the act of reading, rendering the author's challenge to a reductive realism regarding time evident to the reader in his or her own time experience, not merely within the artificial time frame of the novel. For both Nabokov and Stravinsky, the issue of time and its perception was more than an aesthetic problem. The experience of exile forced a many-sided dilemma with regard to memory and anticipation. First was the challenge of how one might come to terms with the artistic heritage, public, and tradition of which the exile once expected to be part, and from which he was separated. Second was the need to grapple with the tyrannies of memory—the lacunae, the willful and inadvertent distortions, and the fragments all heightened by discontinuity and distance, the forced separation from the familiar and the illusions of a continuity that non-exiles take for granted. Third was the danger posed by the allure of nostalgia, the sentimental distortion of memory, and the exaggerated fear of forgetfulness. To forget was in fact to destroy the possibilities of the present and not merely the past. Memory, the driving force of the present and essentia