Nabokov and Olesha Interpreting Two

Nabokov and Olesha

Interpreting Two Passages

From where?" he answered. "Where did I come from?" (He looked at me with clear eyes.) "I myself invented me" (Olesha 52).

Yuri Olesha is playing around with perspectives in this long passage which ends with the phrase above. The scene takes place when he is looking into a street mirror, excited at the tricks it plays, for when he sees a pedestrian coming in the mirror, it turns out he or she is coming from the opposite way they are actually coming from and creates a surprise when the pedestrian brushes against him on the side he is not expecting. The mirror is the focus of this scene in the street.

The mirror also creates an effect the opposite of a telescopic effect, making things appear very small, as if looking in the wrong end of binoculars, and then they suddenly are large when seen with the naked eye. This admission that perspective is warped and distorted is an image of how he sees things in life, as all people do.

In Vladimir Nabokov's book the Gift, his character looks into a mirror at himself, "a pale self-portrait looked out of the mirror with the serious eyes of all self-portraits." (Nabokov 170).

Fyodor is shaving and finds a pimple. However, the pimple is the symbol for everything wrong in his life. He attempts to shave around it and cannot. It continues to appear. He has only cold water and takes a shower, makes the mistake of drying off with someone else's towel and is interrupted in his contemplations of his personal problems by Shchyogolev jerking at the handle of the bathroom door, trying to get in. The mirror is the focus in this bathroom scene.

Nabokov also plays around with perspective, which is a theme echoed in Olesha's work. Here, Nabakov makes the statement that to bathe and dress is as impossible "as the perspective of the early Italians," referring to the inability to understand how to make buildings and objects appear systematically close or distant, as mathematical formulas were later discovered that allowed artists to create a three-dimensional-appearing work on a two-dimensional canvas.

In Russian literature the symbol of the mirror plays an important role, as it has in other literature in Germany and France and in other lands, since the early 1800s. While the two Russian writers compared in this paper did not write during the Romantic Age, they continue the Romantic Theme in their novels. Olesha writes about a thwarted murder and drifting friendships in the novel Envy, published in 1927, which came out the turmoil of the Russian Revolution (Maslenikov 42). The Gift, published in 1937-8 as a serial published in a Russian journal, is a prose-poem wrapped around Nabokov's childhood using imagination, intrigue and a love story, a truly romantic plot (Cornwell 1). That both of these authors use the mirror as a theme is no surprise, as they follow the Romantic tradition. Having read and written all their lives, it was a well-known ploy for creating a sense of contemplation of the world and themselves in it, as they fit into the scheme of things in their individual ways.

Nabokov's Fyodor, spending an afternoon trying to get a nap, finds life frustrating and demanding. He sees a dejected "sad animal" in the mirror, beset with minor tragedies that ruin everything. He examines his face thoroughly, sees flaws and makes half-hearted, destructive attempts to rectify them, only to make things worse. He is annoyed by others and by himself. This could be the story of his life, and it is. Nabokov has managed to summarize a good portion of this character's self-image into a segment of one page.

Olesha has himself contemplating life as seen through the mirror and sees it as warped and confusing, being sometimes the opposite of what he perceives it will be.

Both men also refer to perspective, Olesha talking about proportions and how things appear as if gazing through the wrong end of binoculars. "How improbable the change of proportions," he says and thus refers to how things that one wishes were small are large and vice versa. This is a theory that psychologists use and that Piaget, in his books on the developing child brings out as a person begins to realize spatial concepts, as well as historical concepts in space. The perception of where others stand in relation to oneself is the beginning of a relationship and when the man in Olesha's scene with the mirror comes rushing up and he asks him where he came from, the answer was "I myself invented me." This is a statement about space and how one may or may not occupy space. If the man who made the statement did not really exist, then he would not have said "I myself invented me." Yet his saying this means that he does exist and in realizing that he exists because he has invented himself, refers back to Descartes' belief that "cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am."