Nabokov's Northern Kingdoms: Pseudo-Scandinavian Traces and the Transnational Translation of the Self

Abstract

In a 1966 interview, Vladimir Nabokov remarked, “A sad and distant kingdom seems to have haunted my poetry and fiction since the twenties”. This article seeks to explain Nabokov's fascination with imaginary and often pseudo-Scandinavian northern kingdoms by tracing their development in Nabokov's fictions and relating them to the theme of forgery. It argues that the northern kingdoms Nabokov forges serve a unique creative purpose characteristic of an intermediate stage in Nabokov's own transnational translation as a writer. These fragmented pseudo-Scandinavian forgeries produce a counter-factual counterfeit that celebrates the creative process, wherein the forger of fictions struggles to create his own “reality” and surmount the separation, loss, exile, and nostalgia necessitated by existential exigencies. As exemplified by the texture of his invented northern languages, Nabokov's northern creations perform an act of cultural hybridization that synthesizes and resolves the conflict that tears the exilic self in twain. Thus these imaginary northern kingdoms and languages reconcile Nabokov's own split personality; a Scando-Slavic orientation posits a pole, if purely symbolic, where widely separated lines of longitude might meet, and offers a new magnetic north to reorient the transnational writer set adrift by historical tides.

Keywords:

• Nabokov
• Scandinavian
• Russian
• imaginary
• north
• kingdoms
• translation
• transnational
• forgery
• fiction