Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Véra Nabokov was a very private person and, as she was the first to admit, distrustful by nature. She and Nabokov had been badly hurt by their experience with Andrew Field, whose biography of Nabokov had been riddled with envious rivalry, wild guesses, and astonishing errors (he managed to date the Russian Revolution to 1916 and even defended the date when challenged). After Field, I thought Véra would simply not agree to another biography. But once, when she was trying to deflect my insistent requests to be allowed access to Nabokov’s letters to his mother, she said to me: “Why do you need to see those, if you’re writing only a bibliography? Of course, if you were writing a biography, I would show you everything.” I gulped but said nothing: I was a young academic with new courses to teach and no time to write a biography. But I applied for a fellowship and as soon as I was awarded it, I wrote to her reminding her of her words. She could not deny them, and she let me begin. I saw her every day for a year and a half as I worked through the papers in Montreux, but she did not relax her guard. She did not speak to me on first-name terms until after she read the draft of my first chapter, five years after we first met. Much later, in her last year of life when she found the very act of reading had become physically painful for her, I was touched to see that she still kept the biography by her bedside to reread just for pleasure.

  For the biography of a living figure, or one not long dead, earning the trust of the subject or the heirs is crucial if you wish to have access to materials and contacts. Of course you also need to maintain intellectual independence at the same time as you sustain trust. That’s a delicate task, especially for someone as naturally critical and undiplomatic as I am. Although she had her own strong opinions, Véra respected my independence, partly because she knew how enthusiastic I was about Nabokov, although I could also be bluntly disapproving when I didn’t think his work reached his usual standards.

  But there is perhaps a more insistent kind of control exerted by your dead subject. If you respect your subject, then you want to respect his or her sense of what matters, as well as your own. Nabokov had an astonishing memory and a no less extraordinary ability to evoke his memories in words. He was reluctant for anything about him to be expressed in ways that differed from his own recollections or formulations. He would ask for interviews to be submitted in writing, and he would answer them in writing and then check the interview in proofs. He could not check my material, but his sense of the importance of precise and evocative detail certainly exerted one kind of control over my work. Now, in writing about Popper, I have an opposite kind of pressure since Popper preferred argument to story, ideas to words, explanatory laws to descriptive details, and I will have to resist those preferences without, of course, ignoring the ideas, just as in writing about Nabokov I had to spell out the ideas that he only ever wanted to suggest with the utmost insouciance.

  Many a modern biographer must face a problem Einhard never had to contend with. Anyone famous enough to merit a biography is likely nowadays not merely to know how to write, unlike Charlemagne, but to have already written an autobiography. As a biographer, you welcome an autobiography, but you do not want merely to repeat it. Fortunately, autobiographers rarely tell all. Nabokov, with his fierce sense of privacy, refrained from discussing any living person other than himself but movingly ends Speak, Memory by addressing its last chapters increasingly overtly to an unnamed “you” that we realize must be his wife. Popper, with his resolute focus on ideas, at one point in his autobiography mentions that he has a wife, quickly apologizes for becoming so personal, and moves on.

  Just how do you situate your own effort in relation to your subject’s “official” life story, especially when it’s a performance as superlative as Speak, Memory? I adopted two different solutions to the problem: first, to interpret Speak, Memory as a work of art—and to show how the artistry, the transforming imagination of the writer, in fact can reveal more about Nabokov than a more direct transcription from life would do; and, second, to ferret out those direct transcriptions, the raw facts behind the art, the things that Nabokov would rather we didn’t know.

  Although Nabokov was often hailed as the finest stylist of his time, many readers have found themselves perturbed by the deliberateness of his style. To them, his phrasing calls attention to itself too much to express genuine emotion or even to say anything. I try to show how wrong that is by opening the biography with a close look at one sentence, the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory. There, Nabokov anticipates the day he would look down at his father lying in an open coffin. Again and again throughout his autobiography Nabokov returns obliquely to his father’s murder as if it were a wound he cannot leave alone but can hardly bear to touch. For Nabokov the love of those closest to the heart—a parent, a spouse, a child—distends the soul to dwarf all other feeling. The narrowly focused love that marked his life also shapes his fiction, whether positively or negatively, in the desolation of love’s absence or the horror of its sham surrogates. Because love matters so much to Nabokov, so, too, does loss. But he had learned from his parents to bear distress with dignity, and when he depicts his father high in the midday air he alludes to his private grief with the restraint taught him as a child. The formality and apparent distance in no way diminish the emotion: he simply feels that even a sense of loss sharp enough to last a lifetime must be met with courage and self-control.

  I linger over that sentence to show qualities of mind and tendencies of thought that pervade Nabokov’s life and art. But it’s enough here to note that he thought that sentence was as much as he could bring himself to write about his father’s death. He would never have wanted to publish his intensely personal diary account of his and his mother’s reaction to the news his father had been shot. But that poignant, heartbreaking document was something I just had to quote in full in the biography (chapter 19 in this volume, “Speak, Memory: The Life and the Art,” juxtaposes the sentence from Speak, Memory and the diary entry). Because I had earned Véra’s trust, I had access to that diary even without asking. But the problem of finding materials and of the unevenness of the materials for different phases of a life, are not usually so easily solved.

  Each epoch of Nabokov’s life presented its own special problems. In 1917, when his family fled Petrograd for the Crimea, and again when they fled the Crimea for London in 1919, they had to leave almost everything of their Russian years behind. Data for the first twenty years of Nabokov’s life, other than what he provided in Speak, Memory, were extremely difficult to collect, especially as I was researching in the Soviet Union in the days before glasnost’, when Nabokov was still persona non grata. I had to travel out to Vyra, the Nabokov family estate, which was further from Leningrad than I was legally entitled to go. On my second excursion to Vyra, I spent the whole day taking photographs. A local came up to me about four o’clock, by which time everybody in the Soviet countryside seemed to be drunk. “How did you get here?” he asked, seeing I was a foreigner and taking photo after photo. He seemed to think that I thought the birches and the firs were well-camouflaged missiles. I played the innocent: “By train and bus”—as if I had simply hopped on the wrong ones by accident. We were standing on the bridge across the Oredezh, the river Nabokov had boated on with his first love, the “Tamara” of Speak, Memory. The man’s face flushed with anger; he leaned toward me, until vodka drowned out the smells of summer. “What are you doing here?” Mention of Nabokov’s name might have doomed me— oh, I wouldn’t have been thrown into a gulag, but I might have been ejected from the country or at least grilled by the KGB, as had happened to friends much less objectionable than me. I had noticed a police car pass along the highway a few minutes ago and thought my newfound comrade would be shouting for the police again any second now. Then I suddenly realized there was a way out. Nabokov’s grandmother’s manor house, on the other side of the river, had also been burnt down, but there was a plaque commemorating the fact that the estate had once belonged to Kondraty Ryleev. Ryleev, like the other Decembrists,
had been accorded sainthood by the Soviets as a sacred precursor to their holy revolution. So I told my interrogator—it was true enough, though a very small crumb of the truth—“I came to see Ryleev’s house.” “Molodets!” he cried (something like, “You little hero!”), and he embraced me: “You’re one of us!” I nearly passed out from relief and from the fumes of his home-brew vodka.

  That trip to Vyra told me that, despite Nabokov’s quite justified reputation for an extraordinary memory, his own map of the three Nabokov estates in the endpapers of Speak, Memory was wrong—as his sister had to concede when I pointed it out. I checked what I could independently of Speak, Memory, but for the most part I simply had to rely for that period of his life on Nabokov’s own memoirs and to interpret them for all they were worth. I should add that new material for those early years has turned up since glasnost’ and then the fall of the Soviet system and appears in the French, German, and Russian editions, but not in the English.

  For the next two decades of Nabokov’s life, from 1919 to 1940, the émigré years, the task was even harder. After devoting twelve chapters of Speak, Memory to his childhood, Nabokov allowed himself only three chapters for the émigré years. I was on my own. By the beginning of the 1930s many in the Russian emigration sensed that Nabokov already outshone the acknowledged star of émigré writing, Ivan Bunin, soon to receive Russia’s first Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout the remainder of the decade Nabokov consolidated his position as one of the greatest Russian writers of the century. As German tanks rolled through France in mid-1940, he and his Russian-Jewish wife fled once again. By the time the war ended, the audience and culture Nabokov had written for no longer existed, and its records were either bombed by the Allies (in Berlin), confiscated by the Soviet occupation (in Prague), or destroyed by the Germans—as were many of the papers and a butterfly collection that Nabokov left in Paris with his friend, Ilya Fondaminsky, who was also destroyed.

  For this period, I had to search through scores of Russian émigré newspapers and journals where Nabokov’s work was published or his name mentioned in a review or the report of a public reading. A single copy of a newspaper, its acidic pages brittle enough to flake at every touch, might contain the only record of a particular event in Nabokov’s life. For just one of the most precious newspapers, I had to travel to Helsinki, Uppsala, Lund, Prague, East and West Berlin, Munich, Paris, New York, and Palo Alto to find every issue I could.

  Nabokov spent the next two decades in the United States, following four careers more or less simultaneously: writer, teacher, scientist, literary scholar. There are thousands who knew him as a teacher at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard, but most had no idea he had been famous as a Russian writer and would be famous again as an English one, and so took no special notice.

  In Nabokov’s first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, V’s search for the past of his half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight, becomes a comic nightmare of frustrations, dead ends, and wrong trails because he has no access to the secrets of Sebastian’s life—until a magical character who has escaped from one of Sebastian’s stories suddenly offers him the kinds of clues sober reality would never have provided. At the end of one chapter, V has visited a friend of his brother’s at Cambridge. Just as he leaves his brother’s friend, a sudden voice calls out from the mist: “Sebastian Knight? Who is speaking of Sebastian Knight?” There the chapter ends, and the next begins:

  The stranger who uttered these words now approached—Oh, how I sometimes yearn for the easy swing of a well-oiled novel! How comfortable it would have been had the voice belonged to some cheery old don with long downy ear-lobes and that puckering about the eyes which stands for wisdom and humour. . . . A handy character, a welcome passer-by who had also known my hero, but from a different angle. “And now,” he would say, “I am going to tell you the real story of Sebastian Knight’s college years.” And then and there he would have launched on that story. But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That Voice in the Mist rang out in the dimmest passage of my mind. It was but the echo of some possible truth, a timely reminder: don’t be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale.

  (RLSK 52)

  This was advice I kept in mind. One of the most distinguished of American literary scholars told me of the time he was walking along the corridors of Cornell’s Goldwin Smith Hall with his arm in a sling. Other colleagues joshed him about skiing accidents and the like; Nabokov hailed him with an ebullient and delighted “Ah! a duel!” And then I found out that the incident had not happened to this particular professor at all because another professor almost as well known told me in minute detail of the circumstances—and the first professor, I had noticed, had a memory that seemed fuzzy in the extreme away from the books he still remembered with wonderful lucidity. He had simply heard the tale told and in the retelling had forgotten it was not his own memory. And yet this was a great scholar, and Nabokov’s colleague for years. You can imagine that along with the masses of anecdote I garnered for Nabokov’s American years from those who had stood at the toilet beside him (I kid you not) or heard him in the lecture hall or passed him in the corridor or knew somebody who had passed him once, I was also treated to masses of garbling, misconstruction, and decomposing gossip.

  In his last two decades—from 1959 to 1977, to be precise—Nabokov could afford to retire from Cornell and live in a Swiss luxury hotel. He was an international celebrity, his face on the cover of Newsweek and Time, his books the hottest property on the high literary market, but at the same time he withdrew from the public gaze to the controlled seclusion of his retreat in Montreux, Switzerland. He constructed a literary persona of intimidating arrogance and protested in letters to editors against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy. And although he was interviewed for Vogue, Life, Playboy, People, and American and European TV, he agreed to interviews only if the questions were submitted in writing well ahead of time so that he could craft his answers in writing, too. There were advantages of the steadiness of his life in these years—I could interview his secretary and the concierge and under-concierge and under-under-concierge at the Montreux Palace Hotel and use his own private library and sift through the ton of paper that had now accumulated in his archive.

  But Nabokov had a reputation for arrogance and aloofness that the rococo fortress of the Montreux Palace Hotel seemed to bear out. I remember dressing for my first meeting with Véra Nabokov there. During the last eight of my nine years as a student, I had worn nothing but purple, tangerine, lime green, or scarlet overalls. Knowing of the Nabokovs’ reputation for old-fashioned formality, and sitting in the three-piece suit that my parents had bought in the hope of mending my ways and that I now, in all my gaucheness and diffidence, thought necessary for the occasion, I felt as comfortable as a giraffe on a surfboard. It took years for the awe and the awkwardness to wear off.

  The problems of finding the materials and of trying to compensate for the unevenness of the record can occupy a biographer for many months. But then you have to write. Although at the research stage you are desperate to read every scrap, to find out every fact, you also know that readers won’t want to read about all these facts any more than you will want to write about them all. You want your readers to have the satisfying illusion of completeness, of unreserved disclosure, of unobstructed access, but you also want them never to be bored: believe it or not, you want to be as brief as possible.

  The tension between comprehensiveness and concision is one of many you have to harness as you write. As a biographer, you have to resolve the conflicts between the urge to collect and the urge to select; between the need to set the scene and the need to advance the action; between the desire to explain and the desire to let things speak for themselves; between the impulse to look ahead for d
istant outcomes or back for remote causes and the impulse to treat the present moment in its own right; between the need to provide as much shape and structure as you can and the need to leave room for life’s unruly details; between your wish to remain objective and your knowledge that every phrase creates and colors what you want your readers to see; between allying with your subject and asserting your independence; between attention to your material and attention to your reader.

  And in writing the life of someone whose claim on our interest was not in the drama of battle or courts, like Charlemagne, but in the inner drama that unfolds at a quiet desk, you have to find some rhythm to move between the inner and the outer, the work and the life, the timeless image or idea and time ticking away.

  But time has ticked away long enough. Thank you, Seligenstadt, for the honor of the Einhard Prize, thank you for bringing me here to talk to you, and thank you for listening.

  3. Who Is “My Nabokov”?

  After a talk I gave in the Slavic Department of Columbia University, the editors of their graduate journal asked me to write a personal introduction to their forthcoming special issue on the theme “My Nabokov.” Later in the same trip, the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, where I happened to have spoken earlier on the day I wrote most of this, had put me up at the Hotel Astoria, 39 Bol’shaya Morskaya Street, just on the other side of St. Isaac’s Square from Nabokov’s birthplace at number 47, now the Nabokov Museum—details that will help explain the original ending. Back at my own desk, I have now added a coda.