On the pages of witty Nabokov the following unfolds: Professor Timofey Pavlich Pnin goes about the delightful task of Pninizing his new quarters (the tenth in ten Falls). He stacks the collected works of Lermontov on the rickety bookshelf in the corner, places down the ancestrally held heavy gold lamp with green shade, which every Russian must possess, and ceremoniously installs on the bedside table, as a kind of guardian of his sleep, his copy of Anna Karenina holding much Pninian wisdom in his hieroglyphic annotations. Less than six months after this “house heating” effort he is asked to leave by his landlords for their daughter returned home and demands her room back. This is the story of the Russian émigré, and it yet persists. We live in an age of liberal democracy, of the United Nations, and yet, the stateless Russian emigre, disenfranchised and oppressed on the intellectual plane more than on the physical continues to roam the West. In my own boarding school room, the green lampshade; Pnin on my bedside table, and a friend reciting Brodsky in the original carry the spirit of the emigre into our modern community and, painfully, into my heart.
What does it mean to be in exile? Physically, it means to be unwillfully removed from one’s country and unable to return. Bolshevik troops marched all over Isaiah Berlin’s1 ancestral home; war and radicalism prevent me from visiting my childhood dacha. But to be an émigré is more. It is to encapsulate one’s culture in one’s being. In the case of Pnin it is to do disctictly Russian things which have become Pnininisms: to read Lermontov, to use the, outdated, patrimonial as a means of address (of course dorogoy Timofey Pavlich; pogalysta podayte mne eto Alekasdr Mechalich), to sit underneath the green lampshade and drink chai. To be an émigré is a long Slavic tradition: Isaiah Berlin fled in an orange crate; Alexandre Kojeve, the Hegelian Scholar, although born in Ryazan, lived in Paris all his life; and Vladimir Nabokov, who taught at Cornell not his native Moscow, wrote Pnin about himself; Alexander Gerasimchuk. These people were eternally stateless without the protection of a commonwealth. They always faced and continue to face prejudice, xenophobia, and exclusion. Not fully Russian—for they, through opting in or being co-opted, became members of their adoptive societies—but not seen as fellow citizens of those either. Nabokov did not achieve tenure; Berlin (while working for the Foreign Office) was accused of being a spy. Eternally stateless, they form an intellectual state of their own.
How does this state-building exercise manifest? Milan Kundera’s Ignorance explores the construction of the city on a hill which occurs in an émigré’s mind. If my country has moved so far away from my own principles that I scarcely recognise it, if it implemented systems of political and economic organisation that do not recognize me as an individual, I can no longer be a part of the country on an intellectual level. My thinking has been deterritorialized and made stateless. I must therefore build my own country on the plains of my imagination. This country often amplifies the things that I, as the émigré, consider important and which I no longer have. The concept of a dacha, a rickety wooden summer home perpetually occupied by one’s grandma, is one such thing. From Pnin to me,dacha activities remain unchanged: a ‘summer shower’( a vat of cold water left in the sun) after swimming in sea; drinking strong black chai and playing durak on a summer evening; listening to stories of neighbourliness and good-natured simple mindedness of the soviet union in the stories of my grandparents and movies like Brilliantovaya Ruka. I have never experienced the soviet lightness of being they talk about; or Pnin’s summer evenings in Tsarist Russia, yet these moments make me feel with a memory as though I have . Kundera aptly makes it clear that while I convince myself in my state of emigration, that the empirical experience of the home country is indeed what it was and what it could be, it is simply not the case. When Irena returns, she finds Prague to be dreary, the women to be fat. She finds Slivovitz to burn the throat.
The state of emigration is a state of fiction. It is also a dual state of absurdism and the attached melancholy that goes with it. There is a shadow behind the heart ( title for a bad novel?) in the shape of Odessa, and it shall forever be there. Whenever the civilised world feels unwelcoming and unwelcomed, I recollect an imaginary experience of some dignified elder Odessans sitting around a table, telling each other anecdotes, and speaking in a rather charming slang—which includes words of rather unknown provenance such as friar (not a religious official but a person who shows off) and tudoy (both a geographical and a moral direction)—and a visceral melancholy of loss, also both geographical and moral, descends upon me. A realisation that one is alone in space, culture, and time, however, is also quintessentially absurdist. Each émigré creates an ontologically different culture, for they evoke and construe different parts of their memory to create a unique city on a hill. The beacon of that city then drives them in their new life as a member of their adoptive society but not of its world; a memory of their old life but not how it looks like now were they to stay. To be an émigré is to rebel against circumstances which prescribe loss and poverty; it is to mobilize space rather than be neutralized by it.
Is an absurdist attitude to being an émigré (which smacks of optimism) justified? Pnin gets driven out from his department and gets hit by a bus. Russian literature in exile has the trope of death, defeat, and humour; Pninism and Pninian English are absurd to the American reader and Pnin “a pathetic savant.” as per Mrs. Clements (wife of American academia incarnate), and that is Nabakov’s point. Yes, this man is charming and he is defeated—be sad about it or don’t be but that is what it is. But it mustn’t be. Pnin is unique in his mannerisms and episteme that he occupies. Pnin/ Nabakov or indeed Berlin or even myself must be seen not as victims of circumstance but as rebels against cultural narrow mindedness. As I walk down College Hill, the city on the Hill of my Odessan past; Grecian upbringing and British education behind me blend with the present context of the new world; excitement; opportunity. This brief moment of confluence between the heavy past and the heavy future, paradoxically,produces an Empowering Lightness of Being. This moment is what I strive for.
1: Isaiah Berlin was an emigre intellectual, also from Ukraine, who emigrated to the UK after the October Revolution; I find his life to be structurally similar to mine and his philosophy an intellectual inspiration.
Sole Magazine