Shades of Love: Nabokov’s Intimations of Immortality

All is finished now: the bequeathed gold shines on a shelf in full view of the future, whilst the goldminer has left for the region from where, perhaps, a faint something reaches the ears of good poets, penetrating our being with the beyond’s fresh breath. …

—Vladimir Nabokov, “On Hodasevich”

Nabokov’s worlds of fiction, we have lately come to recognize, are mysteriously haunted: shades or spirits of the deceased animate the local landscape, attempting to exert their influence on its inhabitants. So delicately, and with such supernal finesse, do these specters tickle a novel’s atmosphere that for years they went unnoticed—until their author decided publicly to betray them. In 1972, when asked about the elusive theme of his just-published novel, Transparent Things, Nabokov offered this cryptic, but suggestive, reply: “Its theme is merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies.”¹ Five years later—and only two years after her husband’s death—Vera Nabokov made a more direct attack on the critics’ metaphysical lethargy. In the preface to the posthumous edition of her husband’s Russian poems, Mrs. Nabokov announced the “principal theme” of Nabokov’s work to be “the hereafter.” As she points out, Nabokov employs the Russian word potustoronnost‘ in his last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, translating the term into English as “the hereafter.”²