THE GHOST OF MEMORY

A reading of the short story A Wood Sprite by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1921.  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's story time with Mitch Jezerich. Today, a reading of Vladimir Novokov's first published short story called A Wood Sprite. The story was written in Russian and published in 1921, two years after Novokov and his family fled Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution. It wouldn't be translated into English until many years after his death. The translation came in the 1990s and was done by Novokov's wife, Vera, and son Dmitri. Vladimir Novokov was about twenty years old when he left Russia and then published a wood sprite just two years later while living in exile in Berlin. The story is about an encounter between the narrator and a wood sprite, or forest elf. This mysterious figure, real or imagined, is not clear, is also in Berlin, exiled from his forest in Russia. The story, in part, is an analogy to the Russian Revolution and how the Bolsheviks forced their political opponents out. But it's also much more than that. It's about memory and the poignant loss of an environment known intimately in youth. Nabokov hated the Bolsheviks. He came from a wealthy, educated, and privileged family. But his father, also named Vladimir, was a supporter of ending the more than three hundred year feudal rule of the Tsars. His father was a constitutionalist and was more of a reformer than revolutionary, and found himself at odds with the more hardlined Bolsheviks after the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II. Revolutions usually require a large and politically diverse coalition to overthrow any ruler, and then, if successful, struggle with each other over supremacy. The father was assassinated while in exile, not by the Bolsheviks, but by hard right activists who wanted to restore the monarchy. Life is complicated like that. When the Navakovs fled Russia, they lost their land and more. But Vladimir Novikov wrote in his memoir, Speak Memory, that he did not hate the Bolsheviks because of the confiscation of family wealth. He detested those who said he did. He said it was the loss of his connection to the place of his youth. He wrote, The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche beneath the sky of my America to sigh for one locality in Russia. That, I think, is exactly what this short story, a wood sprite, is about. Many of my friends are on the left, and some may think I'm supporting anti communist literature by reading this. Maybe I am, but that's not my intention. I just love this story because it's a magical tell about time, space, and loss, the nostalgia for a place that is no longer there. We all know that feeling, as though a ghost from the lost space and time is suddenly knocking at the door. I am neither an anti communist nor communist. I am sympathetic to its goals of material equality, but like every system, including capitalism, it is just a system that is based on a theory and not able to hold and plan for all the variables that come with life and large groups of people living together. Sometimes these theories work for a time to keep things together while also being profoundly disappointing for those it doesn't serve well. But I don't blame the system, for it is just a theory. It's the humans who corrupt. So, without further delay, a wood sprite by Vladimir Novikov. I was pensively penning the outline of the ink stand's circular quivering shadow. In a distant room a clock struck the hour, while I, dreamer that I am, imagined someone was knocking at the door. Softly at first, then louder and louder. He knocked twelve times and paused expectantly. Yes, I'm here, come in. The doorknob creaked timidly, the flame of the runny candle tilted, and he hopped sideways out of a rectangle of shadow, hunched, grey, powdered with the pollen of the frosty, starry night. I knew his face. Oh how long I had known it. His right eye was still in the shadows, the left peered at me timorously, elongated, smoky green. The pupil glowed like a point of rust. That mossy grey tuft on his temple, the pale silver, scarcely noticeable eyebrow, the comical wrinkle near his whiskerless mouth. How all this teased and vaguely vexed my memory. I got up. He stepped forward. His shabby little coat seemed to be buttoned wrong, on the female side. In his hand he held a cap. No, a dark colored, poorly tied bundle, and there was no sign of any cap. Yes, of course I knew him. Perhaps I'd even been fond of him, only I simply could not place the where and the when of our meetings, and we must have met often. Otherwise I would not have had such a firm recollection of those cranberry lips, those pointy ears, that amusing Adam's apple. With a welcoming murmur, I shook his light cold hand and touched the back of a shabby armchair. He perched like a crow on a tree stump and began speaking hurriedly. It's so scary in these streets. So I dropped in, dropped in to visit you. Do you recognize me? You and I we used to rump together and halloo at each other for days at a time, back in the old country. Don't tell me you have forgotten. His voice literally blinded me. I felt dazzled and dizzy. I remembered the happiness. The echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness. No, it can't be. I'm alone. It's only some capricious delirium. Yet there really was somebody sitting next to me. Bony and implausible, with long eared German booties, and his voice tinabulated, rustled golden, luscious green, familiar, while the words were so simple, so human. There, you remember, yes, I'm a former forest elf, a mischievous sprite, and here I am, forced to flee like everyone else. He heaved a deep sigh, and once again I had visions of billowing nimbus, lofty leafy undulations, bright flashes of birch bark like splashes of sea foam against a dulcet, perpetual hum. He bent toward me and glanced gently into my eyes. Remember our forest? First so black, birch all white? They've cut it all down. The grief was unbearable. I saw my dear birches crackling and falling, and how could I help? Into the marshes they drove me. I wept and I howled, and I boomed like a bittern. Then left Lickety Split for a neighboring pine wood. There I pined and could not stop sobbing. I had barely grown used to it, and lo, there was no more pine wood. Just blue tinted cinders. Had to do some more tramping, found myself a wood, a wonderful wood it was, thick, dark, and cool. Yet somehow it was just not the same thing. In the old days I'd frolic from dawn until dusk, whistle furiously, clap my hands, frightened passers by. You remember yourself, you lost your way once in a dark nook of my woods, you in some little white dress, and I kept tying the paths up in knots, spinning the tree trunks, twinkling through the foliage. Spent the whole night playing tricks, but I was only fooling around. It was all in jest. Vilify me as they might. But now I sobered up, for my new abode was not a merry one. Day and night strange things crackled around me. At first I thought a fellow elf was lurking there. I called, then listened. Something crackled, something rumbled. But no, those were not the kinds of sounds we make. Once towards evening, I skipped out into a glade, and what do I see? People lying around, some on their backs, some on their bellies. Well, I think I'll wake them up. I'll get them moving. I went to work shaking bows, bombarding with cones, rustling, hooting, I toiled away for a whole hour. All to no avail. Then I took a closer look, and I was horror struck. Here's a man with his head, hanging by one flimpsy crimson thread. There's one with a heap of thick worms for a stomach. I could not endure it. I let out a howl and jumped in the air and off I ran. Long I wandered through different forests, but could find no peace. Either it was stillness, desolation, mortal boredom, or such horror. It's better not to think about it. At last I made up my mind and changed into a bumpkin, a tramp with a knapsack, and left for good. Throos, I do. Here a kindred spirit, a water sprite, gave me a hand. Poor fellow was on the run too. He kept marveling, he kept saying What times are upon us? A real calamity. And even if, in olden times, he had had his fun, used to lure people down, a hospitable one he was, in recompense, how he petted and pampered them on the gold river bottom, and what songs he bewitched them. These days he says, only dead men come floating by, floating in batches, enormous numbers of them, and the river's moisture is like blood, thick, warm, sticky, and there's nothing for him to breathe. And so he took me with him. He went off to knock about some distant sea and put me ashore on a foggy coast. Go, brother, find yourself some friendly foliage. But I found nothing, and ended up here in this foreign, terrifying city of stone. Thus I turned into a human, complete with proper starch colours and booties, and I've even learned human talk. He fell silent. His eyes glistened like wet leaves, his arms were crossed, and by the wavering light of the drowning candle, some pale strands combed to the left shimmered so strangely. I know you are pining too, his voice shimmered again. But your pining, compared to mine, my tempestuous, turbulent pining, is but the even breathing of one who is asleep. And think about it, not one of our tribe is left in ruse. Some of us swirled away like whisps of fog, others scattered around the world. Our native rivers are melancholy. There is no frisky hand to splash up the moon gleams. Silent are the orphan bluebells that remain, by chance unmoan. The pale blue goosely that once served my rival, the ethereal sprite, for his songs. The shaggy, friendly household spirit, in tears, has forsaken your besmirched, humiliated home, and the groves have withered. The pathetically, luminously, magically somber groves. It was we, Ruse, who were your inspiration, your unfathomable beauty, your age long enchantment. And we are all gone. Gone, driven into exile by a crazed surveyor. My friend, soon I shall die. Say something to me. Tell me that you love me, a homeless phantom. Come, sit closer. Give me your hand. The candle sputtered and went out. Cold fingers touched my palm. The familiar melancholy laugh appealed and fell silent. When I turned on the light, there was no one in the armchair. No one. Nothing was left but a wondrously subtle scent in the room of birch, of humid moss.