Journal of Nanzan Junior College 24(1997): 1-16 An Agent Narrating: Nabokov's "A Slice of Life" Akiko Nakata "A Slice of Life" (the original Russian version, 1935; the English version, 1976; henceforth "SL") is the only story that is narrated by a female character of all the works of Vladimir Nabokov. That fact though, has not affected the critics so much, in that the story has received very few commentaries,1) probably because it seems merely a simple and humble short story. I will discuss the female narrator/character in detail so that we could see how her narration--Nabokov's only feminine-first-person narrative--is "superbly successful" as described by Brian Boyd (421), the only critic who has written about its unique narrative. We will also see through the following discussion how the narrative is successful probably in a more complex and difficult way than Boyd suggests. 1 "I" the narrator/"I" the character "I," the narrator or Maria Vasilevna (mentioned once in the story), is unique not only as the narrator but also as a character. She could not belong to any group of women in Nabokov's world. She is not one of the fatal women typified by Lolita, Mary and even Margot; or one of the impressive secondary characters including Charlotte in Lolita(L) or Annette in Look at the Harlequins!(LATH); or one of the heroines as the muse and understanding partners such as Zina in The Gift(G) and "You" in LATH. As a character, she seems to belong to secondary female characters such as Lyudmila and Klara in Mary(M), but she does not. All the other of Nabokov's female characters are women destined to be observed and portrayed by a masculine narrator. She, a conscious narrator herself, cannot be one of them. Mixed in herself are the figure of an astute narrator/observer and the observed-and-narrated feminine character, which makes her an extraordinary being in Nabokov's fiction.2) "I" as the narrator is, for example, considered close to the narrator of "The Vane Sisters" ("VS"). They both are observing, analyzing and rather sarcastic. In the case of "VS," the narrator unknowingly narrates the "unreadable" message from the otherworld, which supplies a climax as dramatic irony. There is no such irony prepared in "SL," and "I" is not an authoritative narrator ruling her narrative space as the ones in "A Guide to Berlin" and "A Letter that Never Reached Russia." Wondering why but yet fascinated by Pavel Romanovich, she cannot help but be involved in a case in which she as an accomplice helps him shoot his ex-wife. In the process of the matter, "I" the character loses control over herself and "I" the narrator watches it quite at a loss. A convict-animal-infant-ladykiller-tyrant lover When she asks herself, "how I could have been swept off my feet by this short, stocky fellow with insignificant features" (142), her question sounds significant, for we do not know the answer as well. We find her affection strange, even though we know that love is always beyond reason and there is no one in love who has any convincing answer to "Why?" Judging from her personality as the narrator, we never can imagine that she could be so attracted to Pavel Romanovich. He is a typical Nabokovian "poshlust"3) character, the especially ludicrous one, akin to Alfyorov in M and Shchyogolev, Zina's stepfather, in G. Of all men, she has been crazy about him barely two years, wept because of him, dreamed of him! He seems to have nothing emotional or intellectual to share with her. "I" the narrator describes him with two images, none of which is appropriate to her lover. First, he is introduced as a convict or a soldier: ". . . his face a regular nightmare, . . . a very Russian kind of cleanliness, habitually making one think of neat engineer troops, but at the present moment reminding me of something evil, something as frightening as a convict's skull" (141). Then the soldier image is repeated: "his turquoise head, his big strong shoulders which a military tunic would have suited," "his massive, 'battlefield' (as he termed it) cigarette case" (143). These images make an ominous premonition for the violence in the climax. Second, he is presented with animal images. She is most fascinated with his teeth ("oh my, what fine teeth!" 142) and then strokes his "hot emery-papery scalp and rosy robust nape," (145) which reminds us of a strong animal with rough fur. When he clacks together the concave palms, she remembers the sound of a procession of cows "letting their pies plop" (145). These animal images are strengthened by "that slender chainlet of steel around his hairy wrist" (143) which has haunted her dream. He has captivated her as an unobtainable animal chained to his wife. Then we find that Pavel Romanovich can be quite a tactician betraying his clumsy soldier/animal images. He plays the role of an infant tyrant and an adult seducer alternately and becomes the master of her actions. When he is taken to her room to be all alone, he at once becomes a different man from the bluffer who has been left by his wife. . . . [Pavel] suddenly broke into tears. I had him sit down close to me on the couch, he swayed to one side with his sobs increasing, and ended by burying his face in my lap. I stroked lightly his hot emery-papery scalp and rosy robust nape which I find so attractive in males. Gradually his spasms abated. He bit me softly through my skirt, and sat up. (145) Pavel plays the baby to her and "I" submits to him acting as his mother. At the same time we see him remember to add the act of an adult seducer--biting softly through the skirt.4) Then he invites her to his flat, and she cannot decline his offer, though she knows that she will regret it. In his flat, Pavel gets drunk with vodka and becomes a tyrant that is a strong man and cross infant. "For no reason at all, he took off his shoes and his socks, and then started to sob and walked sobbing, from one end of his flat to the other, absolutely ignoring my presence and ferociously kicking aside with a strong bare foot the chair into which he kept barging" (147). He makes the very picture of an irritable infant who totters in bare feet, crying and kicking the chair in his way. Then in the third phase of drunkenness, he gets calm and succeeds in persuading her to warn his ex-wife, Lenochka, on her "own initiative." He tightly envelops her "in the web of his thick whisper (while he was hastily putting on his shoes)" and kisses her "cold hands which [she keeps] clenching" (148). When he sees her hesitating, he quickly puts on his shoes returning to an adult and begins to behave as a ladykiller. "I" reluctantly goes to see his ex-wife on his errand and takes her to him only to be shot. Pavel develops from an infant tyrant to a real tyrant and succeeds in punishing his betraying wife. He goes through some phases of change with her assistance, and realizes the evil images which we have seen in the beginning of the story. She attends at all the phases of his metamorphoses into a convict, which means that she is an accomplice not only because she accepts to be his messenger but also because she unconsciously works in the whole case to help him to be guilty. A blind eternal husband The change from an infant tyrant to a real tyrant occurs with his recovery of his sight. At the beginning of the story, he talks about an accident where his wife has taken away "by some oversight" his favorite eyeglasses. From then on he is depicted as short-sighted, with some trouble with his eyes or even blind both physically and mentally. He does not notice "I" until she calls to him--partly because she has stood in a black dress against the dark sideboard. Then he rubs "his inflamed eyes" (142), "broke into tears" (145), "his gaze kept shifting" (146), "walked sobbing" (147) and "rubbed with his minimus his red naked eyes" (149) just before he takes back his "favorite" eyeglasses. His mental shortsightedness is described as follows: quoting him, "nobody could have foreseen such a thing [his wife's adultery]" (143); quoting the narrator, "far-sighted rumor had long been giving her a lover in the very person of the freak" (144). When he regains his glasses he is telling the story of his life, some "slice of life," to a German stranger, and we cannot miss that he opens the case of glasses repeating a significant phrase from his story: "Pavlik," said Lenochka, "here's your pince-nez. I took it away in my bag by mistake." "It is dark there by night," repeated Pavel Romanovich, opening as he spoke the spectacle case that she had tossed to him across the table. He put on his eyeglasses, produced a revolver, and started to shoot his wife. (149) On the level of the story, he is just repeating the part of his anecdote referring to the street where he lived long ago, but at the same time, he tells us that he has been in the darkness--his blindness to the true figure of his wife. Recovering his sight, recognizing his wife completely, he probably for the first time treats her in the way he thinks appropriate. As mentioned above, "I" unknowingly helps him to change from a blind eternal husband into a husband with a critical eye who takes revenge on his wife, but we do not still understand why she obeys his shallow tricks. She explains her involvement as follows: At the present stage, it appeared that he and I had established something (what exactly, remained rather blurry) that displayed her lover as the lowest of villains, and the plan consisted in my going to see her on my own initiative, as it were, to "warn" her. It was also to be understood that Pavel Romanovich remained absolutely opposed to any intrusion or pressure and that his own suggestions bore the stamp of angelic disinterestedness. (147-48) This analyzing passage seems convincing enough, but on the contrary, unconvincing for its astuteness to make us believe that she is influenced by his cheap flirtation. The more she narrates, the less convincing her narration of her affection toward him is. There seems to be nearly nothing in common--except that they both are exiles--between "I" the narrator and the man with whom she insists to be in one-sided love. A feminine character/narrator Here we are going to keep under observation "I" the character, narrated by "I" the narrator, so that we could find some similarities between them. First we notice that "I" the character represents various conventional aspects of femininity. She addresses Pavel when inviting him to her room in her "most crystalline tone of voice" (142), and she curls up beside him lapsing into thought, "cheek-propped feminine thought" (142). While he goes on talking about his ex-wife and her mother, she says nothing "in great sadness looking at him, my lips masked by the fringe of my black shawl"(145). In his flat, "[i]n order to amuse Pavel Romanovich I started to play the soubrette, I put on a dimunitive apron that had been forgotten in a corner of the kitchen, I introduced peace in the disarray of the furniture, I laid the table most neatly. . . "(146). She intentionally pretends modest femininity--the most crystalline tone of voice, masking her lips with the fringe of the shawl, silence; she attends on him like a chambermaid and acts the angel in the house in his wife's place. Her pretention does not succeed in calling his attention to her but only makes herself available to him, though it is intended to impress him. We could easily point out her philistinism in it and in that way she could be somehow well-matched with him. How about the femininity that "I" the narrator presents, the femininity that is not her pretension? It is not so shallow as what the character presents, but we cannot help noticing another philistinism about it. After being recognized standing in black against the dark sideboard, she says to the reader, "yes, I wear mourning for everybody, for everything, for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of me" (142). This short discourse seems to give us enough information on her: an exile from Russia suffering the sadness of losing many people, things; a tired, experienced woman. Though the image of an exile in mourning narrated by herself could get the reader's sympathy, it possibly casts a chill on our sympathy because of its mediocrity and the slight of self-dramatization included in it. Another instance is in her monologue when she looks at her reflection in the mirror preparing for the visit to Pavel's flat: . . . I saw myself in the looking glass of the hallway as resembling a forlorn little nun with a stern waxy face; but a minute later, as I was in the act of prettying up and putting on my hat, I plunged as it were into the depth of my great, black, experienced eyes, and found therein a gleam of something far from nunnish--even through my voilette they blazed, good God, how they blazed! (146) She describes her concealed passion of love blazing out of her eyes betraying her appearance as a pale nun. Reading this, we wonder again whether we should sympathize with her heart-throbbing, or we should be disguised with the very common combination of these images. Her spiteful reaction to Lenochka should be added to the list of things showing her poshlust femininity. First, the narrator defines her by hearsay as in "his wife had turned out to be a cheap, skittish fool" and through her adulterer, "the freak who had now fallen for her cowish beauty" (144). When she calls up Lenochka she hears "her high, stupidly resonant voice," and Lenochka in person is described as being "smartly dressed" but soon after criticized harshly for her hair that has been "curled badly" and in general she has "grown plainer," with "puffy little pouches" about her chicly painted mouth (148). The narrator senses "her disagreeable warmth" while sitting close to her at the pub, and after she was shot the narrator cruelly reports, "Extravagantly groaning, Lenochka (a bullet had merely gone through her fat suntanned shoulder) was driven away to the hospital. . ."(150). Actually we should admit that Lenochka seems a rather stupid woman, nevertheless, the narrator's jealous description sounds terrible. Her repulsion and rivalry out of the jealousy of Lenochka expresses too obviously her shallow "femininity." We cannot decide whether we are sick of her "feminine" repulsion or of her "femininity" as a cliche. Through her reaction to Lenochka, "I" the narrator is again revealed to be a kind of poshlust character, though not exactly the same one as "I" the character, and still far from Pavel. Yuichi Isahaya elucidates some Nabokov's poshlust people other than the helplessly negative, philistine ones who are generally known to be the Nabokovian poshlust. We can find "the sensitive young poshlyak (Isahaya 14) among the characters oftener than we have expected: Yasha in G, Martin in Glory, Franz in King, Queen, Knave, Ganin in M and even Sumrov in "The Eye." Following his classification, we could add "I" the narrator to the poshlust people with some undeniable attractiveness; "I" the character to the pitiable ones; Pavel is only a lowest poshlyak, the mere philistine. This chart makes it easier for us to understand how "I" the character could be affected by Pavel and why "I" the narrator could not seem infatuated with him. The problem of detachment between the character and the narrator makes "I" particular among Nabokov's narrating protagonists.5) The detachment can be seen clearly in her femininity, and it has been displayed anyway through her poshlust features. But is there more to her femininity than that which is given to or forced upon her? This is the question to be answered in the next part. 2 "I" the agent "I" repeats acting as an agent in the story. To begin with, Pavel, as he usually does, has come to talk to her brother, Nicholas, not to her. When he has found Nicholas away, he then talks to the landlord, and then at last to her. While talking to her, he eagerly expects Nicholas to come home: "It's a big pity that Nicholas is out. Let him call me as soon as he returns." "I do hope, . . . Nicky comes back soon" (145). On the other hand, she has been expected to do something for her brother, which was decided before the story begins: "I was still supposed to travel to the other end of Berlin on an errand my charming brother could have well done himself" (143). She cancels the first errand for another errand -- to take Lenochka to Pavel -- which she has taken on "initiatively" even though she does not know how it was fixed. At the bar, she falls under the table dragged by Lenochka who was shot in the shoulder. Then she finds herself walking with a German, who fell with her on the floor, and ends up escorting him to his house, unintentionally. An agent must be an important figure in Nabokov's fiction, when we remember "Cloud, Castle, Lake," in which Vasily Ivanovich is introduced by the narrator as "one of my representatives." At the end of the story, Vasily, having been tortured by a group of German tourists, requests of and receives from the narrator permission to resign his position. According to Andrew Field, Nabokov once refers to Vasily as "my agent" (Field 197). Why Vasily suffers as a representative of human beings, "I" reluctantly plays the role of the other people's available agent, which seems comparatively worthless. Compared with Vasily's, her tragedy must be in the unworthiness of her agency. The more she tells her story -- that is, a story of an agent -- the farther she goes from the position of the subject of the story. Actually the event ifself had already begun while she had a nap. In the climax, she cannot see how Pavel is led away. In the ending, she cannot finish her own story for herself and must walk endlessly seeing Pavel reviving repeatedly. The male homosocial bonding6) Her being involved unwillingly and playing the role of an agent could make an obvious portrait of a woman rejected by the male homosocial bonding. The men in the story strangely unite together. When the story begins -- when she awakes from "siesta" -- Pavel is relating to the landlord how his wife has left him. Forced into listening to Pavel, there was no one else around, and hardly knowing each other, nevertheless the landlord listens to his story strangely "with the air of encouragement" (141). At the bar "I" finds Pavel telling some "slice of life" to a German stranger, who knows little Russian but pleasantly listens to him -- "the sheer process of trying to understand afford[s] him pleasure" (149). These two men do not exactly understand Pavel's story but listen with a friendly and encouraging air. In contrast to them, "I," an outsider, "could not endure the sound of that [Pavel's] horrible hilarity" (141), and "found it impossible to understand what he [Pavel] was talking about" (149). Uniting together without real sympathy -- that could be as well considered to represent the desperate isolation for which the exiles are destined -- are rejecting women from their unity: we notice that the very male homosocial bonding is being built beside her. The German's excuse is a decisive blow from it: " . . . he explained to me. . . that he could not take me to his room because he lived with a chum who replaced for him a father, a brother, and a wife. His excuse struck me as so insulting that I ordered him to call a taxi at once and take me to the lodgings. He smiled a frightened smile and closed the door in my face" (150). For the first time in the story she "orders" the other person and "frightens" him. But what she gets is just getting shut the door in her face. Here is the emblem of her being at the same time dependable for men and rejected from the homosocial -- or even homosexual -- unity. The "very feminine" hatred for Lenochka mentioned above is considered given to her, an available woman settled in the margin of the homosocial bonding and made unable to unite to the other women. 3 Oozy water Compared to the men who unite themselves homosocially/homosexually -- though they do not understand each other -- she is all alone. Having lost her land, lovers, children whom she could have had, being rejected, she has to walk on by herself in the end. . . . and there I was walking along a street which despite the rain's having stopped hours ago, was still wet and conveyed an air of deep humiliation--yes, there I was walking all alone as was my due to walk from the beginning of time, and before my eyes Pavel Romanovich kept rising, rising and rubbing off the blood and the ash from his poor head. (150) Pavel continues recovering before her eyes. The man who should be originally only a ludicrous clown has turned into a tyrant with her assistance and after falling rises again and again like a phoenix. She has to walk on by herself in humiliation watching him recover, as it was destined "from the beginning of time." As the narrator she does not tell her story to win the centering position of the story, but ironically defines herself as an agent or the forlorned in silence, marginality, loneliness. Pavel seems to haunt her as an endless curse. Why on earth should he have such a power? We could find an answer in the "wet" street. The street along which she walks is mysteriously "still wet" despite the fact that the rain has stopped hours ago. The persistent rainwater lingers on the street probably because it is the remains of the world's reaction to Pavel that she has once felt. One heard the rain beating against the windowsill. . . . I do not know why--either because the weather was so very gray, or perhaps because the kind of misfortune that had befallen Pavel Romanovich should demand some reaction from the surrounding world (dissolution, eclipse). . . (143) As the protagonist of G receives some messages from the other world by means of rain and wind,7) the elements here are so favorable to Pavel that in the atmosphere he succeeds in persuading "I" to cancel her appointment and join his plan. In the last part of the story the rain still wets the street, influences her with an air of humiliation to walk on endlessly in a mysterious space without time. In an impressive passage, which assures us of the narrator's astuteness, the water works to keep her away from the recognition. All my romances, by some kind of collusion between their heroes, have invariably followed a prearranged pattern of mediocrity and tragedy, or more precisely, the tragic slant was imposed by their very mediocrity. I am ashamed to recall the way they started, and appalled by the nastiness of their denouements, while the middle part, the part that should have been the essence and core of this or that affair, has remained in my mind as a kind of listless shuffle seen through oozy water or sticky fog. (144; italics added) The last sentence reminds us of a phrase from Speak, Memory (SM): "All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal clelebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour" (39; italic added). It is an important action repeated by the Nabokov's protagonists to glimpse, or nearly to glimpse something real, something concealed.8 But what "I" is trying to see through the water or fog is a kind of listless shuffle, which seems a farcical parody of the quoted clause from SM. We should note that "oozy water or sticky fog," which prevents her from seeing the essence and core, is more humid, sticky fluid than "the haze." Here again water keeps her from being the ruling subject of the story. Water metamorphoses Water in some other figures also induces her vulnerability. Water first appears as filling a lamp base: there was "a rather absurdly wide couch covered in silk, and next to it the little low table bearing a lamp whose base was a veritable bomb of thick glass filled with water--and in this atmosphere of my private coziness Pavel Romanovich became at once a different man" (142). We naturally associate the bomb-shaped base with the womb filled with amniotic fluid because of the preceding sentence informing about her aborted embryos. The couch too large for her small room as well could be connected with the placenta; otherwise it superficially suggests a double-sized bed. These two properties show off her femininity, though rather motherly than seducing. In the air of motherhood, Pavel becomes a different man, stopping his guffaws and turning into a sobbing infant on his mother's lap. Water in the base of the lamp could be imagined as relating to a series of images of a soldier, then finally his act of violence, because it is shaped like "a veritable bomb." From that time on Pavel is haunted by water in various shapes: water flows from his eyes in tears, runs into his throat in the shape of vodka, then drips from his eyes again, prepares the third phase of drunkenness in which Pavel sets to work to send for his wife, totally keeping "I" under his control. On the other hand, water mentally influences "I." It becomes a part of the reaction from the surrounding world to Pavel's misfortune which indirectly urges her to obey him, becomes the screen that keeps her away from seeing through the core of her love affair in her memory, making the scene blurred, and sometimes perhaps more lovely than it actually is. At last it remains as raindrops on the street forcing her to walk on in loneliness and humiliation for an eternity. In both cases the metamorphosing water works as a media affecting her receptivity. It must not be a coincidence that Nicholas has left his "rubber overshoes" at his former place of employment and that the German wears "a voluminous raincoat." These men are "waterproof" and not vulnerable to water which induces her receptivity. Judging from what we have perceived, "I" is considered to narrate a series of complex interrelationships that she herself does not understand exactly. We could define her as the narrator set in dramatic irony like that of "VS" and "Ultima Thule," and it might lessen her uniqueness as a narrator in a short story. We could add that her narration is not especially feminine--if there were no referring to the rumpled dress in the beginning passage, we would have read on unconsciously assuming a male narrator. Nabokov did not mention her as far as being the only female narrator and we do not know if he was content with her narration. At least he would not make a female character narrate her story again, by which we could surmise that he might not have liked her narration so much. One of the reasons why he would not write in the female-first-person might be that he could not become truly interested in a narrating woman. And another reason might be that the distance between the narrator and the character we have discussed is not what Nabokov intended to make, and he did not approve it. Though, in the other respects, Nabokov as usual controls the narrator as perfectly as his other characters so that she narrates only to show her receptiveness, marginality, helplessness, far from constructing her as the decisive subject. She is an observer without a power belonging to observers, and a narrator who tells only her agency or absence. However, as for her femininity, we find it quite extraordinary. Her sensitivity, influenced by water metamorphosing throughout the text, exposed to the textual body, makes the third personality in her. It is the genuinely original femininity which deserves our sympathy beyond the poshlust femininity that she as the character pretends or another kind of it forced on her as the narrator. It must be "something triumphant," something true and original to her, enshrined in her "unhappy, even grotesque, and certainly unenviable" life (Boyd 421). Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to acknowledge my debt to Yuichi Isahaya of Doshisha University. Professor Isahaya not only acquainted me with his paper on Nabokov's poshlyaki but also supplied me with invaluable information on "Sluchay iz zhizni," the original Russian version of "A Slice of Life," nd certain Russian words as well as Nabokov criticism by the Slavists both in Russia and Japan, all of which otherwise would not have been available to me. I would like to express my special thanks to William Naoki Kumai of Nagoya Seirei Junior College. Professor Kumai as always very kindly and patiently read my manuscript and improved both my English and the content. But needless to say, any inadequacies are all my own. Notes ‚PjBrian Boyd evaluates "SL" as follows: "For the only time in his career, Nabokov narrates a complete tale in the feminine first person--and succeeds superbly. . . Not for the first time, the heroine finds herself embroiled in the moral squalor of other lives and humiliated by her own desperate need for love. Nevertheless she somehow retains her kindness, her dignity, her hope. Behind the 'deliberately commonplace, newspaper nuance' Nabokov sought for in the outer events of the story lies his confidence in the imperishable values of the spirit. His heroine's life may be unhappy, even grotesque, and certainly unenviable, but it also enshrines something triumphant" (421). Except for Boyd, only Nataliia Tolstaiia and Mikhail Meilakh show it to "present death cheaply dramatic," "depict the Russian milieu in Berlin" and "belong to the tradition of Russian psychological prose" with the highest artistry, being a "beautifully crafted and fascinating psychological novella" (652-53). 2) Maria Turkevich Naumann characterizes Nabokov's early stories of the 20's with the fact that they have no true heroines and are notable for their absence. See Naumann, p.6. "I" the narrator/character in "SL" as well as Olga in "A Russian Beauty" might be the only exception to the absent heroines from his stories written in the 30's. 3) poshlust (also transliterated poshlost by Nabokov) is a Russian word expressing a very important Nabokovian concept. It is firstly introduced in his Nikolai Gogol and expanded with additional features in his lecture on "Philistines and Philistinism" in Lectures on Russian Literature. It is akin to "smug philistinism" and "dignified vulgarity," and ranges from "harmless kitsch" to "totalitarian forms of government." See Nikolai Gogol, pp. 63-74 and Lectures on Russian Literature, pp. 309-14. 4) The act of his biting is also regarded as the habitual act of a baby, which intensifies his infantility. 5) The distance between the narrator and the character in Nabokov's fiction has been discussed by some critics. For example, Linda Kauffman indicates the crucial distinction between "Humbert the focus" trapped in chronological time and "Humbert the voice" writing from jail, by applying temporal differences between narrative focus and voice discussed by Gerald Genette (Kauffman 76). Leona Toker discusses "the distance between Humbert the erring focal character and Humbert the penitent narrating voice," also following Genette (Toker 211). Cf. Genette, pp. 180-89. Kazunao Sugimoto as well focuses on the distance and demonstrates how the narrator of Lolita and Ada desires to tell the story of himself as the narrating subject being in the present time (Sugimoto 85-87, 92-96). The distance that we are discussing between "I" the narrator and "I" the character of "SL" is not so crucially related with time and it should be considered another kind of distance. 6) On "male homosocial bonding," see Sedgwick. Her book studies male homosocial desire founded on both homophobia and misogyny which has shaped not only the erotic, but also class and national ideologies of the English. 7) The rain and wind entering through the window foreshadows Fyodor's father's return within his dream. See G 348. For the water motif connected with the otherworld in G, see Alexandrov, pp. 110-23. 8) I quote a scene in which the protagonist nearly glimpses something hidden each from M and G. "And as he [Ganin] stared at the sky and listened to a cow mooing almost dreamily in a distant village, he tried to understand what it all meant--that sky, and the fields, and the humming telegraph pole; he felt that he was just on the point of understanding it when suddenly his head would start to spin and the lucid languor of the moment became intolerable" (M@47). ". . . but gradually his [Fyodor's] annoyance with himself passed and with a kind of relief--as if the responsibility for his soul belonged not to him but to someone who knew what it all meant--he flet that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well. . . was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him" (G, 314). Works Cited Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov's Otherworld. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, 1967. Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Isahaya, Yuichi. "Nabokofu shosetsu no 'zokubutsu'" [Nabokov's 'Poshlyaki'."] Eui 24 (1993): 11-18. Kauffman, Linda S. Special Delivery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Nabokov, Vladimir. "Cloud, Castle, Lake." ("Oblako, ozero, bashnya," 1937). Trans. Peter Pertzov in collaboration with the author. 1947. Rpt. Nabokov's Dozen. New York: Doubleday, 1958. 113-23. -----. The Eye. (Sogliadatai, 1938). Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 1965. Rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1990. -----. The Gift. (Dar, 1952). Trans. Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. 1963. Rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1991. -----. Glory. (Podvig, 1932). Trans. Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 1971. Rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1991. -----. "A Guide to Berlin." ("Putevoditel' po Berlinu," 1925). 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