Afterlife and Beyond in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule”
SUZUKI Akira

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule,” originally composed as the first chapter of the unfinished Russian novel Solus Rex in Paris in the winter of 1930-40 (Nabkov’s “last season of Russian prose writing”), survived and appreared in Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1 (New York, 1942); the English translation of “Ultima Thule” by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author was made in Feburary 1971, appeared in The New Yorker (April 7, 1973), and reappeared in the collection A Russian Beauty and Other Stories (1973), which also includes the English translation of “Solus Rex,” the second chapter of the same unfinished and abandoned novel (or Nabokov’s last one in Russian).
Though some critics emphasise the fact that “Ultima Thule” was initially envisioned as the opening chapter of a novel, we can read this unique text not as a fragment of an incomplete novel but as a complete short story. Somewhat like Adam Krug of Bend Sinister (1947), the artist Sineusov, the narrator of “Ultima Thule,” deplores the premature death of his beloved wife in pregnancy and hopes to make contact with her who, he half believes, still preserves her identity and consciousness in the otherworld. Frustrated with a desolate sense of loss, he desperately craves for witnessing the ghostly presence of the deceased wife and tries to write a lengthy and rambling letter to her. The epistolary framework foretells the second narrative unit: a strange tale of Adam Falter, the narrator’s former tutor, who has discovered “the essence of things” (or “the true reality”) and a labyrinthine Socratic dialogue concerning “the transcendental.”
In general, Nabokov’s attitude toward spiritualism could be interpreted as being ambivalent; while exhibiting a detailed knowledge of the history of psychical research in some works, especially in “Vane Sisters” (1951, 1959), he nevertheless maintained scepticism and mockery as exemplified by Sineusov. This ambivalence represents one side of the integration of genuine tragedy and pseudo-metaphysics in “Ultima Thule.”
When translating into English, Nabokov gave names to three originally nameless characters (Falter’s sister, his brother-in-law, and an Italian psychiatrist). Two of the names vaguely suggestive of Edgar Allan Poe’s two short stories──namely, “Eleonora” (1841) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845)──seem to be added for helping to clarify the aforementioned duplicated structure of “Ultima Thule” and two central motives of this text: the early death and the survival of human consciousness after bodily death.