Books: The Nabokov Defense

THE WALTZ INVENTION by Vladimir Nabokov. 1 1 1 pages. Phaedra. $4.95.

“Life,” says one of Vladimir Nabokov’s characters, “makes a constant attempt to prove it is real.” Russian-born Author Nabokov prefers to believe it is not. For him, real life ended with a bang in the 1917 Revolution. Ever since then he has quietly taken refuge in an elegant, ironic domain of private jokes and personal fantasies. Lolita made him famous because the private joke was also a public one that millions found appalling or appealing. His other works (The Eye, Pale Fire, Pnin, etc.) have been more complex fantasies. One of them is this prophetic, satirical play, written in 1938 and now gracefully translated from the Russian by Author Nabokov and his son Dmitri. The reader can scarcely imagine its being successfully performed, but its characteristically savage humor and verbal inventiveness will be earnestly devoured by the large American colony of Nabokovites.

Set in a nameless European republic in the middle ’30s, the play is about a madman named Salvator Waltz and his infernal invention, a machine which, Waltz insists, can produce at any distance an explosion of incredible force. Preposterous, snorts the Minister of War. Waltz obligingly blasts the top off a nearby mountain. Proclaiming an era of universal peace (and general slavery), he seizes the reins of government from the numbed fingers of a gabbling, gasping Cabinet, promptly mounts a demented reign of terror. He responds to an attempted assassination by blowing up a city of 600,000. Weary of ruling, he orders an entire island evacuated and a colossal pleasure palace built there, in which the walls spout frosted-drink faucets, and his bed, at the flick of a button, will glide off to the bathroom.

Fops & Frauds. At first glance, the play seems all aglitter with drolly prophetic lights. Gaudy gadgets have indeed become household fixtures, and man seems forever on the verge of blowing the top off his accustomed world. But Nabokov has not simply satirized the pursuit of absolute pleasure and absolute power. His text is fretted with his customary puns, double-entendres, and literary allusions. More important, in the play’s final scene Nabokov reveals that Waltz’s demonic invention, and his successful rise to power, and—for all the reader knows—most of the fools, fops, frauds, pacifists, pederasts, know-nothings and impotents who people the play, have been merely the fantasies of Waltz’s buzzing brain. This whole monstrous world, suggests Nabokov, is just a madman’s dream. Does Waltz speak for Nabokov? Nabokov says nyet. Yet by refusing to establish any objective grounding, Nabokov reduces his cloud-capped tower of fantasy to a dusty heap of speculation. The reader is left to realize that where there is no possible answer, there can have been no genuine question.