Hazel Shade's Russian Sisterhood, or Is Pale Fire a Feminist Novel? In memory of Gennady Barabtarlo

Abstract

Abstract:The essay traces Nabokov's representation of women from the Russian-language works in which he shows a sustained interest in women's lives to the English-language works whose plots often double as whodunnits, driven as they are by questions such as "who is she?" and "what has she done?" I argue that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, "The Vane Sisters," Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada dramatize what feminist commentators have identified as properties of patriarchal literary representation: the primacy of women coupled by their absence (De Lauretis), under-description (Heldt), and action delimited by the Love Story plot (Russ). Though some of Nabokov's works perpetuate these conventions, his most enduringly mysterious fiction forces readers to care and wonder about women characters who are under-described and overlooked. The essay also uses the insights of feminist scholars who have written on Lolita (Kauffman, Patnoe, Herbold) to argue that Pale Fire extends the achievements of Lolita by staging a different kind of entrapment: readers are seduced into colluding with Shade's obliteration of his daughter Hazel by focusing too much on her body and disregarding her mind. In one of Pale Fire's subtlest ironies, Shade treats his grief at his daughter's loss by foregrounding his own spiritual quest but continuing to ignore hers. I argue further that the importance of Hazel's spiritual strivings become most clear if seen through the lens of Russia's literary tradition. The second half of the essay traces important bonds of kinship that connect Hazel to Tatyana Larin, the female protagonist of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Cecily von Lindenborn, the protagonist of Karolina Pavlova's only novel A Double Life (1848). Pavlova's novel, combining as it does prose and verse, offers more than a formal precedent for Pale Fire: the plot rescues Hazel from the captivity of the Love Story plot and places her in a context that is more relevant to her own concerns. The essay ends with a tribute to Gennady Barabtarlo, for whom Hazel's predicament anticipated the predicament of another beloved but disregarded daughter: Martyshka of Tarkovsky's Stalker.