Gamesman the Man From the U.S.S.R. & Other Plays

By Stefan Kanfer

There are two kinds of people: those who divide things into two categories and those who do not. Vladimir Nabokov is the first kind. In one of his earliest U.S. lectures, the Russian emigre told his classes at Stanford University that there were, essentially, "verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization."

In The Man from the U.S.S.R., four dramas make their first appearance in English, translated by the author's son Dmitri. All are adjectival, although an occasional verb wriggles by to enliven the proceedings. All glisten with the celebrated Nabokovian cunning; all are souvenirs of the post-revolutionary epoch when, in some violent reversal of fairy-tale tradition, Russian aristocrats popped up in Europe as commoners, driving taxis, hiring on as movie extras and waiting on tables.

In the title play, Nabokov examines the somnambulistic life of his fellow wanderers. The plot--a mysterious figure arrives with empty promises of return and recognition--is, as in all the works, secondary. Nabokov, the ultimate gamesman, takes the word play seriously. A coquette demands, "Why don't you say something?" Replies her lover: "Forgot my lines." A woman theorizes, "There were several Lenins. The real one was killed at the very beginning." Another abruptly decides that she is not in love, because "there was no violin."

These interruptions by artifice amount to rips in the backdrop, allowing a glimpse of props and klieg lights. Circumstance and illusion twinkle briefly, then everything is as it was--or is it? Readers of Nabokov's fiction have been here many times before, but it is diverting to imagine the old magician working onstage.

The Event might have come from a pocket in Gogol's Overcoat. In a provincial village of czarist Russia, a portrait painter and his unfaithful wife fearfully await an ex-convict who once threatened them with violence. Again an ambiguous reality intrudes: a character remembers being told, "I and my brother were played by one and the same actor, only in the part of my brother he was good, and in mine he was bad." In a central scene the principals remain themselves, but some of the supporting cast become painted representations.

Two one-acters complete the collection. The Pole salutes the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the Antarctic. It also celebrates Nabokov's favorite turf: terra incognita. The playwright liked to dream of butterfly-hunting trips to the Caucasus, Mount Elbrus, the Amazon. And he recalled "tingles of delight, of envy, of anguish (when) I watched on the television screen the first floating footsteps of man in the talcum of our satellite and how I despised those who maintained it was not worth all those dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world."

The most provocative territory in the Nabokovian universe remains the convolutions of the brain. In the final play, The Grand-dad, this century's refugees are replaced by a French nobleman whose good fortune helped him escape the guillotine in 1792. Decades later he runs into the frustrated executioner, now a senile gent determined to rectify the accidents of history.

Because of a melodramatic structure and blank-verse dialogue, the play is the least successful. Yet its ironies are as diverting as any in the author's short stories, and in a process that surely would have amused Professor Nabokov, The Grand-dad's brevity should guarantee the play amateur and student productions throughout the country, granting new life every semester.

Dmitri Nabokov's notes imply that his father had a belief in an afterlife, so the young actors may feel a mystical warmth (if they do not depart from the text). The son and translator may feel similarly blessed for his scholarly renderings from the Russian.

He may also feel a chill. In an introduction, he attributes to T.S. Eliot the notion that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. Actually that was Robert Frost's line. It is not hard to imagine a lofty scowl from the master of nuance and scruple. Still, given the scope and freshness of this latest volume, he would surely add a final smile.