Books: Prospero's Progress

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school that has rarely fared well in public esteem, expecially in the U.S. Fin de siècle examples were customarily tainted by a kind of Wildean flounce, or could be made to seem so. More often the doctrine has been propounded to excuse artistic self-indulgence, sheer gush, or at best the refined outpourings of private feeling. None of these excesses apply to Nabokov. Few writers have brought to the practice of art for art's sake—or indeed to thematic literature—the enormous talent and discipline, the overwhelming intellectual grasp, the scrupulously objective range of eye and ear that Nabokov commands.

Distaste for the rational, plodding, message-ridden, rhetorical problem novel—which Nabokov has condemned for years—is now widespread. But the objection to the traditional novel is essentially negative, rising as it often does from despair about the possibilities of rational, orderly, middle-class society. Black comedies, happenings, novels without plots are on the whole grim experiments, and the laughter they offer is at best a kind of comic rictus.

Nabokov, who is essentially a prose poet, has always had something quite different in mind. "By poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words," he has explained. "True poetry of that kind provokes not laughter and not tears but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of beatitude—and a writer may well be proud of himself if he can make his readers, or more exactly some of his readers, smile and purr that way." When as a young man in Berlin, Nabokov decided to translate an English masterpiece into Russian, the book he chose was Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps he knew, even then, that the best way for an artist to triumph over time was to vanish like the Cheshire cat, leaving only a smile behind.