But long before Lolita, he had a small, devoted following. His memoirs, first published in magazines, later in a slim volume called Conclusive Evidence, contain some of the most beautiful prose in the language.
The chance to meet him recently in his home in Cayuga Heights was—for this country correspondent and long-time fan—a small triumph. Emitting a series of sonorous chuckles, Nabokov opened the door of a large, red brick house.
The scantly furnished interior had a transitory air which Nabokov quickly explained: “We are birds of passage. When someone goes on leave, we take over. We’ve never owned a home.”
This statement had unintended pathos. Nabokov and his Russian-born wife, a trim, gray haired woman with intense dark eyes, are permanent exiles from their native land. Like many exiles, they’ve never really taken root in their adopted country.
Nabokov was born to an old and aristocratic family in 1899. His grandfather was Minister of Justice under two czars. His father was a liberal statesman whose democratic views put him at odds equally with the opposing cancers of czarism and communism.
Nabokov escaped the Soviet regime to lead the drifting, insecure life of the Russian émigré. He attended Cambridge University, then eked out an existence in various European countries. In 1940, he sailed with his wife and small son for America. He has taught eleven years at Cornell.
In the drab living room in Ithaca, little bespoke this colorful past save a stiffly posed photograph of Nabokov Sr., who died at the hands of czarist assassins in 1922.
The interview was to be mostly about butterflies. Entomology is more than a hobby with Nabokov: he’s a recognized authority in the field. As it turned out, butterflies were scarcely mentioned. Lolita was too much with us.
The Nabokovs are genuinely distressed by some reactions to the book. It has often been dismissed with shrill indignation, smirks, elevated eyebrows and the pursed lips of maiden ladies in libraries and bookstores.
“Some simply haven’t read the book or don’t understand it,” he said. “It is not obscene; it has none of the dirt of many so-called realistic modern novels.”
“Most critics have failed to stress the pathetic side,” said Mrs. Nabokov. “It’s really a tragic story. Here, in the hands of this maniac is this poor girl …”
“And a very ordinary girl …” Nabokov put in.
At first, many critics either confessed to bafflement or else roundly damned the book. Then, presumably after soul-searching and reading other reviews, some came forth with second thoughts. The New Yorker finally placed it in “a special class of satire.” Three words used by a Time critic—“Brilliant, hilarious, horrifying”—form a neat capsule comment.
“Recently, we’ve received some wonderful reviews from smaller newspapers in Texas and places like that,” the author said. “We didn’t expect them and it’s gratifying. America has lived up to her liberal heritage in this.”
What adverse effect has the controversy had on a quiet Ivy League professor living in a respectable, upper middle class neighborhood?
“Absolutely none. Both faculty and students have been extremely serious and intelligent in their approach. It has made me feel very warm inside.”
And what of that other Russian’s controversial work, Doctor Zhivago, bestseller of Nobel Prize fame?
“The political aspect does not interest me. Of course, I’m sure the Soviets are really pleased with the whole thing. They’ve attracted a lot of attention and they get the royalties.
“However, my concern is with the artistic character of a novel. From this point of view, Doctor Zhivago is a sorry thing, full of clichés, clumsy, trivial and melodramatic.”
What of the immediate Nabokov future?
“Just now there is a great deal to be done. I’m controlling a French translation of Lolita. Some of my early novels, originally written in Russian, will be coming out. I’m applying for a sabbatical leave. We’ll probably go to California next summer, then to Europe.”
My Child Lolita
Alan Nordstrom / 1959
From Ivy Magazine, February, 1959. © Alan Nordstrom, Professor of English, Rollins College. Reprinted by permission.
A few months back the long-buried phenomenon of the bête noire reared its head and caused the biggest storm of the literary season. Unjust as it was to compare the delicately textured Lolita of Vladimir Nabokov to the licentious doodlings of Grace Metalious, the same indignant eyebrows arched and the same righteous epithets flew around the sewing circles. Mention of the ban in France fed the flames of a substantial controversy. Champions arose on either side to praise the book’s “artistry” or condemn its “filth.” But while the literary winds blow outside, the man in the quiet eye of the storm remains relatively unperturbed and inaccessible at his Cornell “retreat.”
Slouching comfortably in his armchair, walled from the world and notoriety by dusty stacks of Pushkin, Mr. Nabokov could not have contrasted more to the image that some of his stronger critics have of the creator of the mad Humbert. He seems the professorial prototype, as his tortoiseshell glasses move from his nose bridge, leap forth to emphasize a point and return again to their perch. More noticeable than this is his acute linguistic sensitivity, suggesting the literary craftsman. He looks more British than Russian. Yet his speech rolls gently in Slavic fashion, though considerably mellowed in years spent abroad. His conversations range from butterflies (he and his wife chase them each summer) to his special interest, Russian literature. They fairly glitter with lively anecdotes and pungent observations on the American academic scene.
Born in Russia, Nabokov departed for England and Cambridge when the impending threat of revolution swelled in his homeland. The years between the wars were spent in Germany and France, where he concentrated on developing his immaculate literary style. In 1940, his “Columbian urge” to see America was realized when Stanford University offered him a position teaching “The Art of Writing.” (“Solely,” injected Mrs. Nabokov, “on his literary reputation.”) Appointed to a professorship by Cornell, for the past ten years he has been occupied with teaching Russian and European novels and with continuous literary research and writing.
The idea of Lolita had occupied Mr. Nabokov’s mind for many years, finding vague and partial expression in some of his early Russian stories. From a filed mass of indexed ideas and information, the characters of the perverted Humbert and “nymphet” Lolita gradually took recognizable shape. (Campus scuttlebutt recounts the hours he spent on school buses observing young girls, nine to fourteen). When he canvassed the country for details (studying American motels), he did most of his writing in his car, “the only place in America with no noise and no draft.”
Nabokov’s dignified independence makes him a stimulating lecturer. In training his students to scrutinize the complete assemblage of a novel, he urges: “You do not read, you reread. The first time through read to learn and understand; the second reading is for enjoyment.” The professor’s lectures stress style and structure as the basis of literary study rather than generalized speculation about “father images or personal philosophies.” “You only know the author through his book,” he declares. “An artist is original. He first assimilates his experience and then recreates and invents a world in his book.” In answer to those who would like to see Mr. Nabokov in terms of the perverted Humbert, the professor’s lectures are marked with a perfervid repetition of his thesis that an artist invents his characters, rather than projecting his own personality into them.
“The ideal method of teaching,” avowed the perspicacious professor, “is to pass out recorded lectures which have been carefully and concisely prepared in the quiet of the teacher’s study. With the present system the lecturer undermines his effect with hems and haws, while the student, perhaps, transcribes a name, a dash, and a date.”
“The highest virtue of a writer, of any artist, is to stimulate in others an inward thrill.” Claiming not to belong to any school himself, Mr. Nabokov objects to the generality o
f such an appellative as vehemently as he does to the works of many members of certain schools. Sartre and Faulkner (“They are not artists.”) bore the brunt of his criticism. J. D. Salinger, on the other hand, is “a great, wonderful writer—the best American novelist.” Mention of Mr. Nabokov’s highly controversial Russian contemporary, Boris Pasternak, drew a series of interesting comments. “Pasternak is a poet, not a prose writer. Doctor Zhivago, as a novel, is nowhere—though quite in line with the Soviet conservative literary style. It wanders like Gone with the Wind and is filled with all kinds of blunders and melodramatic situations. Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.”
“Literary expression,” the professor maintains, “must first of all be clear, even when treating obscurities; it must be a unique approach to what the artist feels. This must be the constant quest of the writer.” Through his writings Nabokov has realized this ultimate goal. The lucidity of his style and the freshness of his phrasing best illustrate the natural artistic sensitivity of the man whose child is Lolita.
An Absence of Wood Nymphs
Robert H. Boyle / 1959
From Sports Illustrated, September 14, 1959. © Robert H. Boyle. Reprinted by permission.
To an army of admirers, Vladimir Nabokov, a balding Russian émigré of sixty, is known as the author of that spectacular bestseller, Lolita. To a comparative handful, however, he is revered as V. Nabokov, lepidopterist. Respectful colleagues have named four species after him. He is the discoverer of at least two subspecies of butterflies, one of which, it should be noted, is called (accidentally, but prophetically) Nabokov’s wood nymph.
Nabokov has described his findings in a number of scientific periodicals ranging from Psyche—“A Third Species of Echinargus Nabokov (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera)”—to the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College—“The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hubner (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera).” Rarely can the reader deduce that V. Nabokov, the naturalist, is Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist. Only when writing for the Lepidopterists’ News, a rather chatty journal, is V. likely to peep through as Vladimir: “Every morning the sky would be an impeccable blue at six A.M. when I set out. The first innocent cloudlet would scud across at seven thirty A.M. Bigger fellows with darker bellies would start tampering with the sun around nine A.M., just as I emerged from the shadow of the cliffs and onto good hunting grounds.” (Conversely, Vladimir sometimes artfully assumes V.’s vocabulary, as in describing Humbert Humbert’s first wife in Lolita: “The bleached curl revealed its melanic root.” Melanic is a butterfly word meaning dark.)
Nabokov has had a passionate interest in butterflies since he was a boy of six in Russia. By the time he was ten, he had made such a nuisance of himself with the net that solemn Muromtsev, the president of the first Russian Duma, intoned, “Come with us by all means, but do not chase butterflies, child. It mars the rhythm of the promenade.” In 1919 in the Crimea, a bowlegged Bolshevik sentry, patrolling “among shrubs in waxy bloom,” attempted to arrest him for allegedly signaling with the net to a British warship in the Black Sea. Later, in France, a fat policeman wriggled on his belly through parting grass, suspicious that Nabokov was netting birds. Shortly after Nabokov arrived in the United States in 1940, he became a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, one place, presumably, where his passion was better appreciated. Since 1948 he has been a member of the Department of Literature at Cornell, but he has kept his summers free for his beloved butterflies. Net in hand, he roams the West, unmindful of hooting motorists, chiding cowpokes or snarling dogs.
“This, to me,” Nabokov explains, “is most pleasurable—to collect on mountain tops or bogs. It is nostalgic perhaps, but there is also the pleasant feeling of being familiar with a place and surprised when you get more than you expect. You can get as close as possible to these living creatures and see reflected in them a higher law. Mimicry and evolution are for me more and more fascinating … I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.”
Last month Nabokov and his charming snow-haired wife, Véra, were staying in a cabin at Forest Houses in Oak Creek Canyon, a sort of watch-pocket Grand Canyon, eighteen serpentine miles south of Flagstaff, Arizona. There, tucked away in the woods, Nabokov devoted himself to literature (working over translations of the Song of Igor’s Campaign, a twelfth century Russian epic, and Invitation to a Beheading, a novel he wrote in Paris during the thirties) and Lepidoptera. Lepidoptera, for several days at least, won out.
On a Monday morning, for instance, Nabokov, bundled up in dungarees, sport shirt and sweater, emerged from his pine cabin to sniff the air and see the morning sun. “It is now nine o’clock,” he said, lying. It was really only 8:30 or thereabouts, but Nabokov keeps moving all clocks and watches within his reach ahead to make Mrs. Nabokov move faster so he can get to his butterflies all the sooner. “The butterflies won’t be up for another hour,” he admitted however. “This is a deep canyon, and the sun has to go some way up the rim of the mountain to cast its light. The grass is damp, and the butterflies generally come out when it’s dry. They are late risers.”
He moved inside, sat down on a sofa and picked up a thick brown volume entitled Colorado Butterflies. He opened to Nabokov’s wood nymph on page 11. “This butterfly which I discovered has nothing to do with nymphets,” he said, smiling. “I discovered it in the Grand Canyon in 1941. I know it occurs here, but it is difficult to find. I hope to find it today. I’ll be looking for it. It flies in the speckled shade early in June, though there’s another brood at the end of the summer, so you came at the right time.” He picked up another book, Alexander Klots’ A Field Guide to the Butterflies, and opened to the page on the orange-margined blues. Proudly, he pointed to a sentence which read, “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus.” A look of bliss spread across his face. “The thrill of gaining information about certain structural mysteries in these butterflies is perhaps more pleasurable than any literary achievement.”
Mrs. Nabokov called him to breakfast. “The Southwest is a wonderful place to collect,” he said over soft-boiled eggs. “There’s a mixture of arctic and subtropical fauna. A wonderful place to collect.”
At 9:35, Nabokov standard time, he got up to get his net and a blue cloth cap. The thrill of the chase was upon him as he left the cabin and headed south down a foot trail paralleling Oak Creek. “This Nabokov’s wood nymph is represented by several subspecies, and there’s one here,” he said, his eyes sweeping the brush on either side. “It is in this kind of country that my nymph occurs.”
He stopped and pointed with the handle of his net to a butterfly clinging to the underside of a leaf. “Disruptive coloration,” he said, noting white spots on the wings. “A bird comes and wonders for a second. Is it two bugs? Where is the head? Which side is which? In that split second the butterfly is gone. That second saves that individual and that species. You may call it a large skipper.”
Nabokov walked on. At 9:45, he gave a quick flick with the net. “This is a checkered butterfly,” he said, looking at his catch. “There are countless subspecies. The way I kill is the European, or Continental, way. I press the thorax at a certain point. If you press the abdomen, it just oozes out.” He took the butterfly from the net and held it in the palm of his hand. “This,” he exclaimed, “is a beauty! Such a beautiful fresh specimen. Melitaea anicia.” He took a Band-Aid box from his pocket, shook loose a glassine envelope and slid Melitaea anicia home to rest. “It’s safe in the envelope until I can get to a laboratory and spread it.”
In good spirits, he pushed on. Something fluttered across the trail. “A common species,” he said, walking on, maneuvering the net before him. “The thing is,” he said, “when you hit the butterfly, turn the net at the same time to form a bag in which the butterfly is imprisoned.”
Nearby, another butterfly was feeding on a flower, but Nabokov ignored it. �
�A dusky-wing skipper. Common.” At 10:03, he passed a clarus sitting on a bare twig. “I’ve seen that same individual on that same twig since I’ve been here,” he said. “There are lots of butterflies around, but this individual will chase away the others from its perch.”
At 10:45, Nabokov lunged wildly off the trail and raced up a rocky incline. Whatever it was escaped in the underbrush. At eleven o’clock, he stopped short. “Ah,” he said, a tremor of delight rocking him ever so lightly. “Ah. Oh, that’s an interesting thing! Oh, gosh, there it goes. A white skipper mimicking a cabbage butterfly belonging to a different family. Things are picking up. Still, they’re not quite right. Where is my wood nymph? It is heartbreaking work,” he complained. “Wretched work.”
Back at the cabin, Mrs. Nabokov, fresh from writing letters, greeted her husband in Russian. “Let us hurry, darling,” he said. Mrs. Nabokov smiled indulgently and followed him down the porch steps to their car, a black 1957 Buick, where she got behind the wheel.
Journey in a Nervous Car
The car wouldn’t start. “The car is nervous,” Nabokov said. At last it started. Mrs. Nabokov drove onto Highway Alt. 89 and headed to a butterfly camping ground several miles north. At 11:26 (Nabokov standard time), Mrs. Nabokov swung over to the left side of the road and parked by Oak Creek. Nabokov leaped out. “Now we’ll see something spectacular, I hope!” He waved farewell to Mrs. Nabokov with his net and jogged down a rough trail. He stopped. A butterfly was sipping nectar from yellow asters. “Here’s a butterfly that’s quite rare. You find it here and there in Arizona. Lemonias zela. I’ve collected quite a few. It will sit there all day. We could come back at four and it would still be here. The form of its wings and its general manner are very mothlike. Quite interesting. But it is a real butterfly. It belongs to a tremendous family of South American butterflies.”
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 4