by Robert Roper
† In the fall of 1959 the Nabokovs traveled to Europe for the first time in two decades to attend celebrations for Lolita. Dmitri, meanwhile, was planning to move to Italy for further operatic training. He did move, and eventually his parents settled nearby—it was ever their wish to live near him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like anyone embarking on a book project, I was nervous as I found myself edging into this one. Great authors intimidate even as they attract, and Nabokov is immense: all of Western literature is in play with him, finds a conduit through him. He is the great python of art, having made bulging repasts of Russian literature, French literature, and English literature from Shakespeare forward; throwing in his own twentieth century, from the Silver Age poets of his youth to the postmodernism he largely brought into being, he becomes about the longest literary snake ever. I have enjoyed reading him since I was very young. The pleasure I take has a lot to do with time: not how he handles it as a theme, but how I experience it as I read him. His sentences happen at a pace that makes my brain happy, that intoxicates, and I find that I have “enough time” to read this or that passage without worrying, for once, about how many pages remain until I’ve finished yet another book. For me there is something unique with him, something very like the “enchantment” he often spoke of wanting his readers to feel.
He has been much studied, by professional scholars and by amateur appreciators. The devotion of these Nabokovians takes the form of conferences, websites, listservs, newsletters, societies organized in his name, numberless articles and books, and so forth. I myself am a Nabokovian—I say it proudly, while fully aware of its taint of fandom. Yet as a Nabokovian I am uncomfortable, mildly, with the tone of adoration. The promiscuous use of the word genius, for example, unsettles me. The great writer is reckoned a genius of the novel, of poetry, of entomology, of the short story; of college teaching to classes of three or four hundred, of the chess problem of the “solus rex” type; of the theater play, of the essay. All right, I will allow that he was a very talented fellow—an extremely talented fellow.*
I am put in mind, however, of a concept first explained to me by the historian Judith Walkowitz: the concept of the bar mitzvah boy. The bar mitzvah boy is gifted at everything, he insists that you admire him, and if you don’t believe he’s wonderful and the best there is, you only have to ask his mother. The issue is not whether Nabokov achieved superb things of several kinds, but why, 115 years after his birth, distinguished scholars are still carrying water for him, arguing for his status as a polymathic genius. Why did Nabokov himself maneuver to be recognized as such? You would think that he would have grown up.
Worship leads to possessiveness, I’ve noticed, and what I most feared as I set out was that a network of scholars, all of whom knew each other well and many of whom knew Nabokov’s work (especially the work in Russian) much, much better than I, would resent my uninvited intrusions. But as it happens, when I did get in touch with this or that Nabokov authority, he or she was unfailingly kind. I realized at some point that I needed to read everything that had been written about him. I sat in a comfortable chair for two years and ingested the biographical and critical literature. Much of it, to my pleasure, was witty, substantial, revelatory. In itself it was enjoyable to read—as literary commentary should be. The best of it took me back to my halcyon college days, when I read well-phrased ruminations by the likes of John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Edmund Wilson—men I imagined as tweedy gents smoking pipes in rooms full of books, a fire in the grate, snow drifting down outside the mullioned window. I had gone to a small college where the philosopher Monroe Beardsley—co-author of the important New Critical pronunciamento “The Intentional Fallacy”—lectured, and though I had never made it into one of Beardsley’s classes, his approach somehow rubbed off on all the young English professors on campus. They taught me to avoid a biographical approach, taught me to look for “structure” and “patterns of imagery” in texts whose purpose I was not to worry about, and the books of criticism they assigned us to read were, as I said, engaging in their own right.
The scholars who answered my occasional queries include Professor Brian Boyd, of the University of Auckland; Professor Eric Naiman, of the University of California, Berkeley; and Professor Emeritus Stephen J. Parker, of the University of Kansas. For an enjoyable lunch and discussion of some matters that had long puzzled me, though for him they were old hat, I wish to thank Professor John Burt Foster Jr., of George Mason University, whose Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism is the single most suggestive work on Nabokov’s cultural inheritance that I found. Professor Foster read the present book in manuscript and pointed out a number of embarrassing mistakes. The manuscript also benefited from—and the author took encouragement from—a close reading by Professor Galya Diment, of the University of Washington, whose own writing about Nabokov is full of quiet humor and strong feeling. Other readings came courtesy of the writer/ epidemiologist Andrew Moss, of San Francisco, and the novelist/memoirist Rob Couteau, of New Paltz, New York.
Herb Gold, who knew Dmitri Nabokov as a tennis partner and who took over Vladimir’s classes at Cornell, entertained me with stories of both men—very funny stories. Richard Buxbaum, hired to help with the drive to Utah one summer, gave me a feeling for what it had been like to be cooped up with the family in a moving vehicle for a few weeks: in a word, fascinating.
At the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the richest archive of Nabokov materials in the world, the staff were always welcoming, their ethos of tolerant professionalism making the Berg a joy to visit, even if the main reading room is sometimes a degree too cold. My uncertain questings found focus through the assistance of curator Isaac Gewirtz and librarians Becky Finer, Anne Garner, and Lyndsi Barnes. At the American Museum of Natural History, David Grimaldi, curator of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, helped me understand the kind of lepidopterological literature Nabokov was likely to have read in the 1940s. (Taxonomic rather than theoretical: Nabokov was uninterested in, or at any rate uninformed about, breakthrough concepts in population genetics developed in the twenties that would come to undergird modern evolutionary thinking.) Suzanne Rab Green, also of the AMNH, gave me a colorful account of her discovery, with Dr. Grimaldi, of insect specimens Nabokov had collected in ’41 and given to the museum, which had then languished in a closet for seventy years. Andrew Johnston, scientific assistant for lepidoptera, helped me search out other Nabokov gifts to the museum.
At the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard, Rod Eastwood was generous with his time, despite my being only the latest in a long line of fans curious to see where Nabokov had worked, what his bugs had looked like, which window his workbench sat under, etc. Also at Harvard, Peter McCarthy, the undergraduate president of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, answered questions about club tradition and led me down to the meeting room in Claverly Hall, with its old climbing gear lying about, its tattered climbing books, and its general air of a fraternity basement.
As I put together the story of the Nabokovs’ flight from France in May 1940, I spent some days at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, where I was guided by Fruma Mohrer, chief archivist, and by archivists Gunnar Berg, Leo Greenbaum, and Roberta Elliott. Valery Bazarov, HIAS director of Family History and Location Services, gave me an understanding of that organization’s actions early in World War II and of its role in getting the Nabokovs out. Tanya Chebotarev, of the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University, guided my reading of Nabokov’s Russian-language correspondence. Simon Belokowsky ably translated all documents from Russian, although the final wording in English is my responsibility. Olga Andreyev Carlisle, memoirist and clear-eyed participant in some of the monumental politico-literary dramas of the twentieth century, entertained and enlightened me during a discussion of Nabokov’s grudges against the Soviets and against history itself. Sarah Funke Butler, of Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller
, in New York, helped me track down N.’s personal copy of Edmund Wilson’s A Window on Russia, with N.’s bemused marginal notations on Wilson’s comments on N.’s career. Avery Rome, one of the sharpest editors I’ve ever encountered, heard me out and offered typically thoughtful advice at numerous points in my writing and research. Michael Doise, literary investigator in Rouen, France, discovered the cost of steamship tickets for the Nabokovs in 1940 on the French Line vessel Champlain. For my portrait of Dmitri Nabokov, I was fortunate to be able to interview the closest American friends of his young adulthood: Barbara Victor, Sandy Levine, and Brett Schlesinger, all of New York. Ivan and Peter Nabokov, Dmitri’s cousins and the older two sons of Nicolas Nabokov, helped me understand some themes of the family’s protean encounter with America. Their accounts of their lives and careers were extraordinary “speakings of memory.”
At the Houghton Library, Harvard, the Beinecke Library, Yale, and the Library of Congress, I was benignly left alone by considerate and efficient staff who made me feel, as I always feel when I visit institutions like these, that I am deeply fortunate to be a citizen of an open society, one that has provided, so far, adequate resources for the preservation of the written past.
My astute wife, the historian Mary Ryan, held my hand, listened to me complain, argued with me, and seemed oddly confident that I would eventually find a way to write about Nabokov in America. I thank her and embrace her. Michael Carlisle, my redoubtable, ever-cheering agent, was a brick and a joy to have on my side, and Anton Mueller, my editor at Bloomsbury, and his colleague Rachel Mannheimer added insight and calming good counsel at various points. I wish also to thank personal friends who engaged with me in the sort of discussions that make projects like this one, with so many aspects and complications, feel doable. Robert Spertus and Paul Gruber, deep readers and men of learning who wear it lightly, were especially helpful, as was Peter Jelavich, the great scholar of modern Germany. For this writer, the most treasured friends are those before whom one finds oneself unable not to speak freely.
* There is also the school of testy carping, of taking on the great man and knocking him down a peg or two. This is probably best exemplified by the writer Andrew Field, whose studies of Nabokov in the seventies and eighties seemed to want to prove that the critic was just as smart as his subject. The current author hopes not to be Fieldian. He also hopes that his study will not be seen as a vulgar nationalist assault on the assertively multi-nationalist VN, claiming him for xenophobic America, tucking him deep into the American Lit folder and saying that that’s the last word to be said about him. There are no last words.
PHOTO CREDITS
Little Cottonwood Canyon: Author’s photograph.
SS Champlain: photographer unknown. Credit: Heritage-Ships.
Edmund Wilson: photographer unknown. Courtesy the Edmund Wilson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
El Rey Court: Author’s photograph.
Bears and cars in Yosemite: Photographer unknown.
Craigie Circle: Author’s photograph.
MCZ butterflies: Author’s photograph.
Alta Lodge: Unknown photographer. Courtesy Alan Engen and David Davenport.
An approach to Lone Peak.
Columbine Lodge stationery: Courtesy of the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian & Eastern European Culture, Columbia University. Copyright The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, L.L.C.
Longs Peak: By permission of Allen Matheson.
Columbine Lodge cabin: Author’s photograph.
Tetons postcard: Unknown photographer. Courtesy the Edmund Wilson Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Leatherstocking Tales cover: Illustration by Carl Offterdinger.
Disappointment Peak: Author’s photograph.
Telluride hillside: Author’s photograph.
Dmitri in his first MG TC: unknown photographer. Courtesy Roger Boylan, Autosavant Magazine, and Ariane Csonka.
Corral Log Motel outside view: Author’s photograph.
Corral Log inside view: Author’s photograph.
Mt. Carmel cabin: Author’s photograph.
Mt. Carmel cabin, interior: Author’s photograph.
Nabokov at Plaza Motel: Carl Mydans for Life magazine. © Getty images.
Dmitri beside ’57 MG: unknown. Courtesy Roger Boylan, Autosavant Magazine, and Ariane Csonka.
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