by Brian Boyd
We all have our own Nabokov, and—despite some seeing him as a tyrant to his readers—he would have it no other way. When he said that his ideal audience would be a room filled with little Nabokovs, he did not mean by that a room of identical thinkers but a room full of people who could derive as much pleasure and point from his texts as he had taken the trouble to provide. He always took things in his own way and expected anyone who was properly alive to do the same.1
We may each have our own Nabokov, but, like friends or family, he changes for us as well as remaining the same. When I pick up Nabokov after not having read him for a long time (and this does happen), I immediately hear his unmistakable voice, see via his singular vision, laugh at his unique humor with recognition and surprise but often, also, with a sense of discovery as I notice nuances, echoes, or implications I have never previously seen. Even when I reread, even though he still says what he said the last time I noticed this page, I hear with new ears, though I had heard and felt I understood before.
We all have our unique associations with favorite writers that accumulate over a lifetime. Nabokov recollects reading War and Peace “for the first time when I was eleven (in Berlin, on a Turkish sofa, in our somberly rococo Privatstrasse flat giving on a dark, damp back garden with larches and gnomes that have remained in that book, like an old postcard, forever)” (SM 199). I recall reading Lolita for the first time in the Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition with a black-and-white Sue Lyon (at fourteen, a year older than me) on the jacket. My parents had both left school at fourteen in the Depression to support their families. They knew I had an appetite for books, but not knowing how to satisfy it, they had bought a bookstore with a lending library both as a business and to offer me somewhere to graze. I soon apprehended that one of the tomes I had to reshelve in the library, Lolita, was both “a dirty book” and “a modern classic” and, knowing my parents’ Puritanism, snuck it home and hid it under the pillow when I wasn’t reading it. It mystified me then, in many ways, and although it mystifies me now in completely different ways, I can still evoke some of those first feelings.
As I can also evoke in a different way the thrill when, three and a half years later, I picked up my next Nabokov. In the bookstore my parents had built up a large stock of magazine orders for regular customers, and it was my job on Saturday to check off against the shipping invoice the bundles sent by the distributor and to place customers’ orders in their folders. Had I still been the age when I first read Lolita, I would have read almost all that crossed my gaze in this way, from English schoolgirl comics to encyclopedias by weekly installment, but by my last year at high school I had become more careful with discretionary reading. On May 24, 1969, on the narrow mezzanine looking into the rest of the bookshop, I checked off Time magazine, which had a cover story on Nabokov to mark the publication of Ada. Three years older than when I had tried Lolita, I now found fascinating everything that Nabokov said in the red-boxed story with the headline quote “I have never met a more lonely, more lucid, better balanced mad mind than mine.”2 Dazzled by his language, ideas, and attitudes, I rushed to the Palmerston North public library for the latest Nabokov novel. Finding Pale Fire, I read it with more enchantment and exhilaration than anything I had ever encountered—and I still regularly recall that sense of explosive discovery and vivid magic when I think of the best in Nabokov or when a fresh blast of discovery shakes me in anyone else’s fiction.
At the end of that year my father gave me for Christmas the first English edition of Ada, newly arrived in New Zealand, with our bookstore’s rubber stamp on the paste-down front endpaper. I still have it beside me at my usual desk, with not only the plastic protective jacket that the bookstore usually added for its library volumes but also a second-generation second plastic layer I’ve added to hold together what is now my most valuable physical possession, since its marginalia provide the raw data for most of my ongoing Ada annotations.3 I recall re-re-re-reading Ada for my doctoral thesis, in a south-facing room in Toronto between 1976 and 1978, with a strange light catching the colored glass on the fanlight above my desk as I added still more marginalia, or reading the “Pale Fire” poem aloud to roommates in the kitchen of that old Edwardian brick house. I recall reading Nabokov’s novels in Russian, between 1981 and 1983, over a late-night thé citron in the ground-floor café of the Montreux Palace Hotel during breaks between working on the biography up on the sixth floor, in the former laundry storeroom at the end of Véra’s corridor where all her husband’s manuscripts were housed. I recall arguing with Alexander Dolinin as we walked along the icy Nevsky Prospect, with his wife Galina Lapina, the Russian translator of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, looking agog from one of us to the other as we passionately debated, on December 11, 1990, the dating problem in Lolita. I recall reading Ada again to my students in the Nabokov Museum, a floor below where Nabokov was born, at the Nabokov 101 Summer School in July 2002. Just as I will remember tonight, where a few hours ago I spoke at the Nabokov Museum, about Lolita and evolution, and as I hope I will remember writing this, looking out across my left shoulder to the polished pillars of a spruced-up St. Isaac’s gleaming in the lamplight. Late November, and a poor night for mothing.
We all have our unique associations with favorite authors. Strange how recalling them can make memory speak so volubly, when we sometimes fear it can only stammer or stumble.
And strange how, as I expand this for Stalking Nabokov beyond the space I was allowed for Ulbandus, I think of Nabokov paying tribute to his father at the end of the first chapter of Speak, Memory or focusing on Dmitri’s developing mind in the last chapter, and of Dmitri, now in his seventies and looking so like his father at that age, telling me he still recalls that experience of “Finding What the Sailor Has Hidden.” I look at the photo of my father at the far edge of my desk and at the copy of Ada beside me, with his stamp in it, and think of what he gave me—even though he could not read Nabokov, or my Nabokov biography, let alone offer anything like the vast personal library that Nabokov’s father was pleased to see his son roam in.
By the time I was seventeen and writing on Pale Fire I was already growing a patchy beard. Twenty-five years later, because it was starting to grey before my head hair, I shaved it off and was surprised to see in the mirror what seemed my father’s face looking back in surprise at the resemblance. (When, already dying of cancer, he saw me for the first time without the beard, he scrutinized my shaving job and said: “You could have stood a little closer to the razor.”) John Shade in the poem “Pale Fire” writes about the inspiration that comes to him as he shaves, and as I now shave each morning, that passage from canto 4 will be more likely than not to spring to my mind. That’s how close my Nabokov can be.
Now I’ve written this, I expect that my morning shave will be linked now not only with my memory of my beardless self looking back at me with my father’s face, and my imagining Shade shaving, but also with memories of Nabokov’s tributes to his father in Speak, Memory, to the inspiration he sensed his father gave him, to the fact that he has Shade shot, just after he finishes writing canto 4, on July 21, 1959, his own father’s birthday, in heart-wrenching homage to his own murdered father. My Nabokov builds patterns in time. So does life, as generation gives, and gives way, to generation. Nabokov helps us notice, and care.
NABOKOV’S MANUSCRIPTS AND BOOKS
4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive
Véra Nabokov invited me in 1979 to catalog her husband’s archives in Montreux, hoping that they could then more easily be sold to an American institution. Buyers approached in the 1980s offered too little. By the beginning of the 1990s, the New York Public Library was on the point of purchasing the papers for the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, famous especially for its Joyce and Woolf collections. As details were being settled, Dmitri Nabokov became anxious about finally parting with his father’s archives. Rodney Phillips, director of the Berg Collection, and Lisa Browar, directo
r of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Libraries at the New York Public Library, fetched me from New Zealand in June 1991 to meet them in Montreux to help reassure Dmitri. Dmitri especially feared further piracy of Russian Nabokov materials by publishers and scholars from Russia. I suggested that the Russian materials in the archive should remain inaccessible for as long as it took for Russians to respect copyright, and the deal went ahead.
Once the archive was installed in New York, the New York Public Library announced the acquisition with an exhibition, a dinner, and a talk that I gave at the Celeste Bartos Forum in the Central Research Library on October 16, 1991. I wanted to suggest how the papers now in the Berg made it possible to understand Nabokov’s life and works in new ways and how the papers’ preservation by Véra—she had died earlier that year—could serve as a new lens not only on Nabokov’s career but also on her dedication to it.
The Nabokov papers are now the most frequently consulted in the Berg Collection.
In Flaubert’s Parrot Julian Barnes writes:
You can define a net in one of two ways…. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as … a collection of holes tied together with string.
And then, for some strange reason, he proceeds to talk about biography.
In the case of Nabokov’s biography, it’s a wonder that we’re left with anything but holes. He had a hypertrophied sense of privacy. “I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom peeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of ‘human interest.’ I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life” (LRL 38). He would deplore the fact that I was allowed to see the manuscript from which I have just quoted, and he would especially deplore the fact that I am about to quote what he first wrote: “no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life—I hope”; he then crossed out the hope, lest a biographer think that there might be some hope of peeking behind the scenes.1 He placed a fifty-year restriction on the papers he deposited at the Library of Congress. He hid behind literary masks and then retreated entirely from the public gaze to the tranquility of Montreux. Ensconced there, he fired off brusque letters to various editors protesting against factual inaccuracies or infringements of his privacy.
In his books Nabokov turned biography upside-down and inside-out. His critical biography of Nikolay Gogol begins with Gogol’s death and ends with his birth. His last Russian novel, The Gift, contains as an insert the young narrator’s 120-page biography of the real writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky, full of genuine scholarly detail but exuberantly defiant of every biographical decorum. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the narrator’s comically frustrated search for the facts of his half-brother’s life becomes not only all we can have of Sebastian Knight’s biography but also a handbook for all biographers, crammed with precepts and cautionary tales.
Nabokov had least time of all for the biographies of writers, and trying to compose his biography seemed at times like preparing a lovingly executed portrait for a Byzantine iconoclast. “Remember that what you are told is really threefold,” he intones in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: “shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale” (RLSK 52). Shrewd advice, wise caution. Much more chilling for a potential biographer of Nabokov is this comment that V. makes on Sebastian Knight:
I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed [his manuscripts] long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm, and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.
(36)
In his own person, Nabokov stressed “the plain truth of the documents…. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer—plain facts, no symbol-searching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions” (SO 156).
All this makes my presence here something of a miracle. I happen to be in North America at the moment for two main reasons: for the publication of the second volume of my Nabokov biography, and for this announcement that the Nabokov Archive has become part of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. But Nabokov says he wants a biographer to stick to the plain truth of the documents—and then wants all the documents but the published works destroyed. Hardly a promising basis for either a biography or an archive.
As if Nabokov hadn’t constructed all these ramparts between himself and the future image of his past, history added moats of its own. The Nabokov family had to flee at short notice from Petrograd to the Crimea in November 1917, leaving behind a young lad’s papers, books, and butterfly collection; they had to flee again from the Crimea to London in 1919, in even more desperate haste; and after becoming the most distinguished new writer to emerge in the Russian emigration, Nabokov had to escape Europe in May 1940 as German tanks rolled toward Paris. This time, he left some of his papers in the basement of his friend Ilya Fondaminsky’s home. Fondaminsky’s apartment was ransacked by the Gestapo, the papers were scattered across the street, and Fondaminsky himself was carried off to die in a concentration camp. Other materials, including the manuscripts of much of Nabokov’s unpublished early work, had remained in Prague in the custody of his mother and then passed into the keeping of his rather erratic and unliterary sister, Olga. After the Iron Curtain descended, Olga, conscious of the Soviet bloc’s attitude to émigrés, burnt many of her brother’s letters to their parents. In the 1950s Nabokov himself, at a time when he was still planning to publish Lolita anonymously, burnt each index card of the manuscript as soon as Véra typed it up. Somehow he also simply lost the manuscript of Pnin.
But the success of Lolita not only earned Nabokov a reprieve from teaching but also saved his papers from the ashcan. Suddenly faced with much more to pay in income tax than ever before, he was approached by the Library of Congress to donate some of his personal papers in return for a tax concession. Despite his abstract convictions, Nabokov readily agreed and continued to donate more material over the next ten years until the tax laws changed. And from the Library of Congress’s first approach he began to hoard assiduously his notes, his manuscripts, his galleys, and his page proofs, sometimes in duplicate or triplicate. So much for destroying everything.
For all the drama of abandonment and destruction enacted by Nabokov’s papers, other forces had in fact been at work all along to ensure that an unusually high proportion of his work survived. Those forces are easily identified: their names were Elena and Véra, his mother and his wife. For decades his mother gathered, transcribed, and pasted into albums her son’s published and unpublished verse, stories, plays, essays. The fat albums she assembled in Prague from his manuscripts and her own transcriptions did not reach Nabokov in Switzerland until the 1960s; now they constitute one of the glories of the Nabokov Archive and the prime tool for establishing the canon of his early work and the development of his art.
Véra Nabokov always denied that she was Zina Mertz in The Gift, but if the two women—both Russian Jews, both muses for a Berlin émigré writer—are not identical, they are the only known specimens of their very distinctive species. Fyodor finds out that Zina has been collecting clippings of his verse even before they meet; and Véra’s first album of Nabokov’s poetry, now in the Archive, begins with clippings of his poems published almost two years before she met him. Already before they were married Véra was preserving everything Nabokov wrote and everything she could find that was written about him. Fifteen years later, when he switched to English and the originality of style he had evolved in the Russian emigration proved an
obstacle to publication in America, she began to preserve all of his rejections slips for the amusement of posterity, never doubting that posterity would see things her way. Another twenty years on, as cartoons about Lolita began to appear in newspapers and magazines around the world, she collected them all. Two decades later, after her husband’s death, she still carried on, despite age and ill health. She even fetched me all the way from New Zealand to Switzerland to sort out the manuscripts. And just this year she died, seventy years after clipping out that first Nabokov poem. Now that clipping and the album she pasted it into are here, in a collection that owes so much to her seven decades of dedication.
Nabokov asked of his biographer just “the plain truth of the documents.” I had to violate his sense of biographical method. I interviewed people he would not want me to have seen; I saw papers he had asked to be destroyed; I stalked and I sleuthed; I gathered all the facts I could and then had to move beyond the plain facts into attempts at explanation. But although I knew he would have arched his pale eyebrows at my methods, I still wanted to imagine he might not have thought my results simply “attractive but preposterous conclusions.” He hasn’t let me know.
If I couldn’t confine myself to the “plain truth of the documents,” I also couldn’t have done without them: documents Nabokov never dreamed of, documents that turned up in places where he never set foot, but especially the thousands and thousands of notes, letters, diaries, and manuscripts in his own hand that now form part of the Berg Collection.