Miracles and Non-Miracles: the Motif of Rebirth in Nabokov's "Christmas"
Vladimir Nabokov, known today as one of the greatest Russian authors of the twentieth century, had a passion other than writing: butterflies. “My pleasures are the most intense known to man,” Nabokov once said, “writing and butterfly hunting” (Boyd 74). These two loves often intertwined in his works. This relationship is evident in his short story "Christmas," which tells the story of a father, Sleptsov, who has recently lost and buried his son. The story follows Sleptsov through a few small, intimate moments of grief. One such moment is when Sleptsov goes through his son’s things, including his son’s old butterfly collection. At the end of the story, Sleptsov seemingly gives up on life; just then, a hawkmoth pupa his son had been keeping in a box hatches, brought out by the warm room. In "Christmas," Nabokov explores the theme of hope using the motif of birth and rebirth in his setting, in his plot, and in the autobiographical elements of the story.
Nabokov’s use of a beautiful setting, juxtaposed with Sleptsov’s grief, conveys a sense of hopelessness to the reader. In part 2 of the story, Sleptsov goes out onto his veranda, and the narrator describes the view: “the reflections of the many-colored panes formed paradisal lozenges on the whitewashed cushionless window seats […] farther off loomed the radiance of the park, where every black branchlet was rimmed with silver” (Nabokov 132). Nabokov uses words such as “radiance” and “paradisal” to convey a sense of transcendental beauty to the reader. He uses alliteration through the phrase “black branchlet," and assonance through the phrase “rimmed with silver,” in order to further perfect the scene. The harmony of the language matches the harmonious setting Sleptsov finds himself in. This perfect beauty, juxtaposed with Sleptsov’s grief, seems almost cruel, as though the world does not care about Sleptsov’s loss. He pushes snow off of the veranda “bitterly, angrily,” and thinks about his son, but the beauty continues: “ice blocks [sparkle],” and “beyond the light silver mist of the trees, high above the squat isbas, the sun [catches] the equanimous radiance of the cross on the church” (133). Nabokov reuses the word “radiance,” and uses assonance again in the phrase “silver mist,” to show that the world has not changed in response to Sleptsov’s display of grief. Sleptsov already feels alone. The insensitive beauty of the world around him only increases this sensation.
Nabokov sets the story during Christmas to elevate this disparity between the external and internal world. Christmas is the holiday on which Christ was born, the first iteration of the motif of birth and rebirth. Sleptsov’s valet, Ivan, brings a tree into the house. When Sleptsov asks for it to be taken down, Ivan says, “It’s nice and green. Let it stand for a while,” in an attempt to help Sleptsov overcome his misery, as Christmas is typically a holiday of hope (135). However, Christmas, and the tree, hold no meaning for Sleptsov. He is grieving, and has no evidence of a miraculous world in the face of his son’s death. It is simply another event that happens from year to year. The instance of the birth of Christ is not a new miracle, and so provides Sleptsov with no hope for the future.
Conversely, the parallel birth of the chrysalid engenders a feeling of hope in both Sleptsov and the reader. Just before the cocoon bursts, Sleptsov thinks that “earthly life [lies] before him, totally bared and comprehensible—and ghastly in its sadness, humiliatingly pointless, devoid of miracles” (136). He thinks the world is pointless, and, possibly, his existence as well. This moment of complete dejection is directly followed by the miracle of the chrysalid bursting. The birth of the hawkmoth offers an answer to Sleptsov: the world is not comprehensible, expectable, or “devoid of miracles”; a miracle has occurred right in front of him. Nabokov more explicitly defines this “answer” when he says that “having broken out, [the hawkmoth] was now slowly and miraculously expanding” (Nabokov 1925, 136). He uses the word “miraculously” to respond to Sleptsov’s despondent declaration that the world was “devoid of miracles”. The hatching of the hawkmoth as a direct response to Sleptsov’s grief also acts as a juxtaposition with Sleptsov’s disconnect from Christmas: the hawkmoth “emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to his warm room” (Nabokov 1925, 136). The miracle was both more intimately connected to his grief, as the chrysalid belonged to his son, and was also actually caused by his grief, making it a direct response to Sleptsov’s grief in a way the miracle of Christmas was not. Nabokov’s use of the hawkmoth as a symbol also implies the idea of rebirth instead of simply birth. Life, which had already existed inside of the chrysalid, takes a new shape. The rebirth element offers a new sort of hope that the consistency and expectedness of Christmas does not. It mirrors, or engenders, a sort of rebirth for Sleptsov as well. Just as he thought the hawkmoth was dead, and then it was reborn, Sleptsov was having suicidal thoughts, and has now experienced something to give him hope again. Using the idea of rebirth, the narrator affirms that life will continue on in a necessarily different form for Sleptsov after his son’s death, but it will still continue.
The autobiographical element of "Christmas" also represents a rebirth. Nabokov himself, like the son in the novel, was a butterfly collector. When his family fled to Crimea, he had to leave one of his collections behind at his family estate. He took only one thing from his collection with him: a Hawkmoth pupa in a box, which hatched seven years later on an overheated train car. In a lecture given at Cornell, Nabokov said he “actually finished high school while the thing was still asleep”; similarly to Sleptsov’s story, the hatching of the hawkmoth came after a transition in his life (Landa 280). The story was possibly also influenced by the death of Nabokov’s father in 1922, two years before the story was published. His father was killed by an assassin who was attempting to shoot someone else. The unexpectedness of his father’s death mirrors the unexpectedness of the son dying before his father (285). The loss is not exactly the same as the one in "Christmas," and so serves as a sort of autobiographical rebirth of events in Nabokov’s real life. This act of re-writing may also be a form of hope: his father’s death, and his lost butterfly collection, re-shaped into a form that outlives Nabokov himself.
Nabokov’s differing uses of the motifs of birth and rebirth in "Christmas" help him to explore hope and how it manifests. He sets the story during Christmastime, a holiday of birth and hope, in order to demonstrate that hope is not easily, systematically created. He then uses a mirrored event, the opening of the cocoon, to show the reader that hope and miracles are possible. His use of events from his own life, re-worked and re-formed, also reflects the idea of rebirth as a form of hope. The reader is left with no clues as to how Sleptsov reacts to the opening of the chrysalid—they are left to react themselves, and to find their own form of hope in the story.
Bibliography
“Hindsight, Intertextuality, and Interpretation: A Symbol in Nabokov’s ‘Christmas’ (2003), by José Angel García Landa, Symbolism: an International Annual of Critical Aesthetics, Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer, eds. AMS Press, 2005, pp. 267-294.
“Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera (2000).” Stalking Nabokov, by Brian Boyd, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, pp. 73–99.
