@Haines Brown. Yes. Nabokov's literary talent is beyond every norm. Especially since he wrote in, as he put it, "...a second-rate brand of English.” A few others have written English prose at a similar level to Nabokov. None better.
3
A fascinating connection that this article doesn’t bring up is that in “Pale Fire”, the protagonist and poet John Shade is killed “incorrectly”, meaning someone else was the target of the murder. Shade is mistaken for the judge (his neighbor), who sentenced the killer to his sentence in prison. Nabokov’s own father was killed in the same manner. The hitmen during the killing were aiming for someone else and accidentally killed his father. What luck.
2
Someone above inquired about the source for the title of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It’s from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens: “the moon’s an arrant thief/And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.” 4.3.432-33 Arden ed. The Arden footnote on this passage nicely ties it to Nabokov’s book.
3
It is always sad to see how small-minded and all to human brilliant writers can turn out to be. Nabokov a great snob life-long could not abide the 1919 Revolution or any whiff of it, but not a word from him about the wages of serfdom or the Czar and the Russian aristocratic classe's endless monstrous crimes over the centuries. Dommage.
3
Exceptional research on Mr. Nabokov’s beginnings. I wondered what first short story Stacey Schiff referred to that was rejected-my hunch is “The Enchanter”, my first real introduction to Nabokov which was the seed to Lolita. I have an abundant library of Nabokov which was bestowed upon me from my late Uncle Albert Paulsen who compiled Nabokov’s works into a one man show, a two hour theatre piece stemming in Los Angeles and running on the college circuits. Thank you Stacey for reawakening my Nabokov library for pages to devour.
4
"The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life." ~Samuel Johnson
3
The language in "Lolita" is extraordinary -- and perhaps could not have been written by one raised only 'on' English: it is exquisitely unique and engaging, beyond the brilliance of most any native English-speaking author. That Nabokov suffered, as did millions, through the Russian insanity, surely affected his art -- how, one never knows. But his work will endure, beyond memories of his unfortunate support of such ultra-conservative obscenities as McCarthyism.
4
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."
Vladimir Nabokov ... excerpt from his memoir "Speak Memory"
14
Pasternak could read and translate Georgian poets into Russian, which worked in his favor with Stalin - Zhivago is boring drivel as a novel but served a political purpose for the West in the early years of the Cold War - Nabokov was much, much better -
7
To correct many misunderstandings in today’s replies, thanks to an English governness English was Nabokov’s first language, French his second and Russian his third. He wrote first in Russian because he lived in the emigre communities of Europe. He lived on soft money at Cornell and taught literature to Pynchon, Richard Farina, Bob Scholes, and the novelist Steve Katz. He was however incorrect in stating that Emma Bovary’s eyes are amber; they are amber only in front of a roaring fireplace. In fact her eyes change color with her environment, as light reflects the world around her in them as others see her, especially her lovers. Btw Humbert doesn’t seduce Lolita, Lolita seduces him — the writing problem of raping a child ostensibly solved — and she does so because she enjoyed sex with a boy at camp — another writing problem ostensibly solved. But Lolita is Humbert’s confession of learning to love as a father, if too late, and yet reiterates his own arrested development over the loss of his first love. Killing Quilty redeems him, another writing problem ostensibly solved. Would that Nabokov had loved his brother enough to save him from death in Nazi Germany. His brother was gay.
10
I've read most of Nabokov, and the thing that I find most moving in his writing is his hatred of cruelty and his compassion for the suffering of ordinary people. I've never forgotten the description in Pale Fire of the death of John Shade's daughter even though I read it more than fifty years ago. It's easy to think of Nabokov as a dandy, which he was, but that's only a small part of him.
6
"In 1919 even Russian liberals were infected with anti-Semitism, the Jews having been credited — in their customary role amid populist unrest — with having turned the country upside-down."
Some things stay the same, although they may migrate. Not that many liberals or "liberals" in Russia today, but still plenty of anti-Semitism.
But there are plenty of liberals in the Western world infected with anti-Semitism, for an astounding array of reasons.
Nabakov understood in general what US liberals of his time could not and would not understand.
1
I've never been able to read more than three or four pages of Nabokov pice. Sorry about that. I don't think it's his English that's the problem. It's the opaqueness of his mind. Or the absence of a personality. Nabokov is all mask, and no face.
But he had an interesting life, one that would would read well as a novel.
3
Thank you for the excellent
article about the fascinating
Vladimir Nabokov. Stacy Schiff’s
biography Vera, Vladimir’s wife,
is a MUST read. One is awed
by Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).
Her life, abilities and contributions to
her husband are equally compelling.
7
This is a facinating and beautifully written piece. Among other things it reminds us how thin the line is between great artists who thrive after surviving perilous circumstances and the great artists who are swallowed up in history's brutality. Although Mr. Nabakov would have viewed me as one of those 1960's hooligans, I am not in the least offended. He came by his views honestly after much pain and loss.
4
Pity today's poor refugees.
4
Nabokov was a subscriber to "National Review." He was always popping up in his friend William F. Buckley's "Notes & Asides" column.
3
My reaction to this piece apparently runs against tide. Here is a representative of the ruling class, someone with the advantage of wealth and aristocratic status, and who proudly embraced the liberal ideology of capitalism. Because of his class affiliation he fled the Soviet regime aimed at power by the working-class. a dictatorship of the proletariat. Does his literary talent warrant the apotheosis of one so hostile to the working class?
11
@Haines Brown Yes.
20
@Haines Brown "The advantage of wealth and aristocratic staus" was a major reason the Nabokovs fled the Soviet regime--the Bolsheviks had slaughtered tens of thousands of Russians, including members of the upper class--those who had wealth and aristocratic status.
4
@Haines Brown
"Because of his class affiliation he fled the Soviet regime aimed at power by the working-class."
His family fled because his father, a prominent liberal, was on the Soviet's hit list. And had the family stayed, no doubt Vladimir and other members of his family would have been swept up in Stalin's murderous rampage.
10
There is no such thing as a “40 year old seducer of prepubescent girls”. That is what is called a child rapist.
4
This is so wonderful an article I thought, this must be part of a book.
As a note, I believe ( I can find only a reference to another NYTIMES article written in 1970) Nabokov once lived in the hills of Berkeley, if you can say that in Berkeley, California when it was free, civilized, fun, spacious, and had great affordable food. That's a reward for having propelled himself out of hell into minor hells.
2
@RR
Schiff, Stacy (1999). Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Pan Books Ltd. ISBN 0-330-37674-8.
(Winner of 2000 Pulitzer Prize)
1
Wow. So many comments on Nabokov. I find that a little bit encouraging.
8
Understand that this well-written piece is about Nabokov's life and time in America that brought out the literary firepower he possessed...what happened later in his life for him to die in Montreaux, Switzerland?
2
@AB
Later in life, Nabokov's earnings permitted him to leave the academic life and live comfortably in retirement at age 61.
2
@AB A.J. Cronin retired fairly young to Montreux, where he was friends with Hepburn, Olivier, Chaplin. I don't know if it was tax avoidance that led Nabokov there, or, as in Chaplin's case, discomfort to/from the USA. Ms. Schiff is a very good writer, but she is sold on Nabokov. He did a little good work, and a lot of overweening nonsense. Lolita made him rich, and off he went to Switzerland. But it is an egotist's view of an egotist.
3
I believe that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was one of Nabokov's students at Cornell.
3
It is a prescient sign of Nabokov's artistic intuition (and independence of a customary English-speaking education) that he wrote a charming poem about "Shakespeare" meeting Cervantes at a Mediterranean tavern, implying that the writer was, not our industrious, penurious burgher from the Midlands, but a world traveler, high-born, knowledgable and as recondite a pursuer of his writer vocation as could be achieved in his time. wjray.net,
http://www.wjray.net/shakespeare_papers/nabokovs-premonition.htm
1
Thanks to Stacy Schiff for her well-written account of Vladimir Nabokov's life journey. Nabokov was a a true Renaissance man, with multiple life skills. He could teach boxing and tennis, but was a noted lepidopterist, and spoke and wrote in three languages.
As a photographer of living butterflies, I was fascinated that he was curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and came up with a theory about the origin of a genera of blue butterflies that occur in N. America. It was dismissed after his death, but with the use of modern DNA sequencing, turned out to be correct--that the origins of these tiny blue butterflies is Siberia when the temperatures were warmer several million years ago. They flew down past Alaska, then into N. America. Nabokov was a genius to figure this out without DNA sequencing!
Another fascinating aspect of Nabokov's life is that he had a grapheme-color synesthesia, which is when people see specific letters and numbers in specific colors. What a gift.
11
"Nor would he for a minute forget murderous regimes, brutes, bullies, bigots or philistines of any kind."
Those Romanovs, they had been just the most peachy-keen kind-hearted bosses, the whole aristocratic lot of them. Why in the world did all those brutish, uneducated, depressingly monolingual peasants and factory workers feel a silly revolution had been needed, anyway. Those ingrates! The wealthiest .1% always had their best interests at heart...
3
nabokov writes lyrical sentences but child rape without the perspective of the child is a shatteringly obtuse topic. there is no excuse that makes lolita acceptable.
3
Ah, the good old days of the Romanovs and serfdom. How we miss them. It is like South Florida crying for the good old days of Batista.
2
lovely writing!
2
Actually, Vladivostok held out as a white bastion long after the fall of Crimea to the reds-- until 1922.
2
The Bolsheviks and the Nazis attacked and destroyed the greatness of European and Russian literary culture with the same accusation -- decadence. Any focus on the personal in the arts was considered decadent and corrupt, and probably inspired by Jews. These two extremes, seemingly opposite, attacked the arts from the same direction.
26
You might have added to the author's identification that she won the Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Nabokov's wife, Vera, in 2000.
7
Replaced competent and qualified? That must be a sick joke. There was nothing "competent" and "qualified" about those Russian rulers the Bolsheviks replaced. And it was the Bolsheviks who turned a backwards illiterate (<30% literacy rate) peasant country with per capita GDP of only one tenth of that of the US into the second most powerful industrial empire in the world in under 40 years (1957 Sputnik). And they did it in the face of overwhelming and often aggressive hostility of the rest of the world and having to fight two devastating wars in which almost 20% of population and half the productive capacity was lost but the world was saved by the Russians' sacrifice. On top of that, the workers in the West owe their comfortable living and save working conditions and ample leisure time and access to education for their children to that same Bolshevik revolution, without which they would still be working 12 hour days in dusty factories just to put food on their tables.
4
According to Stacy Schiff, Nabokov never knew more than a few words of German although he lived in Berlin for many years. That seems unlikely. In an interview in Strong Opinions he said that he read Goethe and Kafka “en regard”. And his correction of the Muir’s translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis in his Lectures on Literature bears this out.
5
Excellent condensation of part of a life-story. For my own part I knew nothing of Nabokov until he died and then read everything he wrote in short order after reading his obit in these pages.
1
Having read all of Marquez in Spanish and English, but not having read Nabokov {you can't read everything} this fine study and these comments fill me with desire to do so.
And, at the same time, this article, our present Trumped- up immigration crisis, the great humanist value of a bilingual understanding of cultures, makes me wonder just how many Nabokov/Marquez refugees are now down there on the southern border, confined under a bridge, asking for protection and hoping for a future.
40
And, as a footnote, you should want to peek inside the Nabakovian soul, which he would deny exists. So read the beautiful, clever, gem of a diminutive novel, Pnin. If you don't cry when you encounter the dishwashing scene, you are without affection! And then when you wipe away the tear, you will wonder are you heartsick for the man or the aquamarine bowl or both. If you want to spelunk into the Nabakovian subliminal caverns, this is a beautiful nutshell. Read it!
5
I could not get beyond the first page of Lolita or any other Nabokov fiction because of the florid writing. He seemed to be trying to show that, yes, he could write in English. What I did llike was Speak, Memory and other nonfiction. And I loved his eclectic occupations: butterflies at a high academic level, chess, tennis, etc.
1
Very interesting and informative article, well-done.
It reinforced my suspicions that Nabokov has been somewhat over-rated. A master artist does not have to mock his peers (as cited) purely on egotistical grounds.
4
@Samm
Unfortunately many artists, like many people in general, are not very nice. You will do yourself a disservice if you gauge an artist's greatness by his/her personal failings.
4
"On seizing power the Bolsheviks made their first victims the intellectuals who had preceded them."
This is patently dishonest. What Schiff leaves out was that Nabokov's father was a pre-war leader of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party, which supported the Tsar, and then during 1917 revolutionary period was a Secretary of the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, which over the course of months sought to find stability by restoring the monarchy, just as a constitutional one. Then after the Bolshevik-led revolution, he became Minister of Justice of the Crimean Regional Government, which worked under the protection of the Germans, against the Revolution for the restoration of the monarchy and crushing of the workers movement.
5
I was young enough that when Lolita came out in the US, all I knew/heard about it was that it was racy, likely in the way I would have heard about Lady Chatterly. So surprised (if not shocked) I was when it was on the reading list put together by my Barnard freshman English teacher, Catherine Stimpson (and along with Six Crises, Autobiography of Malcolm X, Portrait of a Lady,...). I so vividly remember starting to read it and being compelled to go out into my dorm hall numerous times, saying "listen to this!" "listen to this!" -- for the stunning writing, not at all for the salacious topic. My first fully conscious experience of brilliant writing. What a gift. And thank you, Kate Stimpson!
5
He has been one of my favorite authors for decades. This article is an excellent reminder that political movements can have far reaching consequences and that all too often the thugs and half wits end up running the bureaucracies they create.
Ironically, I am reading Zhivago at present. Was not aware of the feud between them.
3
"He can write, but he's got nothing to say", said Isaac Babel of Nabokov.
No wonder he spent all those years doing penance in modesty within a grand hotel in Switzerland. Guilt for not joining the White Russian army?
"Living in a hotel eliminates the nuisance of private ownership... it confirms in me my favorite habit- the habit of freedom." Well, Nabokov, at least that statement is profound.
2
Thank you Ms. Schiff. It was wonderful reading this essay- just to see Mr. Nabokov's name anywhere these days gives me hope that literature, the world's one true god (always considered literature as the real gospels, reminding and teaching people how to live and act morally) was still out there somewhere among the avalanche of tweets and Facebook posts and internet click-bait.
In 'Lolita', Humbert tells about writing something funny that would elicit chuckles from a handful of people that would read it. For your story to be in such a prominent position where more than a few people would not only read, but be reminded that Nabokov existed and wrote wonderful novels and were truly moved by how well written your Op-Ed piece was.
Thanks again.
7
I imagine my generation to be the last generation to know of Nabakov and his work. I applaud the Times for publishing an article on an author few Americans have heard of let alone read. And that's the beauty of the Times. Thank you.
14
@Douglas Ritter
I was in Bassano del Grappa about 10 or so years ago with an Italian "uncle", who lived and still lives in Padova. He loved to drive me around the surrounding towns, which, like much of Italy, are spectacular. The 16th century-built wooden bridge across the fiume Brenta is a delight. I remember looking down into the crystal clear alpine-origin water. Wonderful area around there.
2
How memory would fuel his work! I'm reminded of Nabokov's own satisfying summary of "Ada," written into the book's final paragraphs:
"Ardis Hall -- the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis -- this is the leitmotiv rippling through "Ada", an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America -- for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-borne caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams?
"Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe in gaze in the ancestral parks; and much, much more."
6
An elegant and moving account of Vladimir Nabokov's life in exile, but Schiff should have mentioned that Nabokov wrote one of the best autobiographies ever written: "Speak Memory." It is a book that should be read by everyone interested in twentieth-century history. It is moving, harrowing--and, at times, funny. A must read.
12
@Stephen Miller Agree. I like it better than his novels.
1
In a finishing school above Vevey in the 1960’s I once chased butterflies with Nabokov one early summer day much to our mutual delight.
13
The Bolshevik revolution was bad enough without having to idealize the period that preceded it, even if it was so in the mind of Nabokov. The world that Nabokov lost was the idle world of old nobility, while Russians soldiers, workers and peasants had been dying in the Great War by the millions. Brutality was not a new thing in Russia, it is the vulgarity that bothered Nabokov the most.
Otherwise, a nicely written account of a great author reinventing himself.
11
My grandparents were peasants during the czar’s time- books and other texts in their own language were illegal, they were very poor, and males were regularly forcibly drafted into the czar’s army.
5
I was in the last throes of a dissertation on Nabokov and hoped to make my way to Switzerland to visit and interview him. But his death made all that impossible. He was a wonderfully subtle writer with incredible insight as well as a sly sense of humor. I preferred the Russian and pre-Lolita novels to the ones that came later when a quasi-academic life diverted him into the deeper waters of experimentation, making reading his books something of a chore. One of his best books is his autobiography, Speak Memory--in my opinion one of the best of its kind in English.
Even in his letters, his prose shines. In a 1932 letter to his wife Vera, He describes a visit to a friend's house in Paris, and the cat that lived there: "My darling, what a cat they have! Something perfectly stupendous. Siamese, in colour dark beige or taupe, with chocolate paws and the tail the same. Moreover, his tail is comparatively short, so his croup has something of a little dog or, rather, a kangaroo, and that's its colour too. And the special silkiness of short fur, and some very tender white tints on its folds, and wonderful clear blue eyes turning transparently green towards evening, and a pensive tenderness of its walk, a sort of heavenly circumspection of movement. An amazing, sacred animal, and so quiet--it's unclear what he is looking at with those eyes filled to the brim with sapphire water."
There are several other mentions of the cat, including it's name--Zen-zin.
26
Bravo, bravo, bravo. Thank you.
Sometimes one wonders why the Times wanders so far afield, picking up where the New Yorker and others once thrived. Other times, like this one, the cause is clear, pure and joyous, a stab in the literary darkness of our times.
25
It's heartening--and increasingly rare-- to read such excellent writing in the New York Times. Stacy Schiff is the real thing.
19
I never knew a Russian refugee who couldn’t tell you exactly what is wrong with Russia and what is wrong with the US. And, in essence Russia is not enough like the US and the US is not enough like Russia. Refugees are caught between two worlds. And they become parodies of themselves. That Nabokov had things original and fascinating to say tells us there was a stroke of genius.
6
His amazing, deeply felt, and vivid autobiography, Speak Memory is a wonderful and deeply engaging read. Nabokov's sense of personal history is sensitively and brilliantly depicted, and,yes, his intellectual voice will engage you-- his remembrances are vivid, detailed, and rich with extraordinary imagery.
9
This is more or less a well written summary, with a few details added in, of Speak, Memory.
1
There are times when I learn something about an author I had admired that I did not know before and the entire edifice comes crumbling down, like when I learnt of Naipaul’s private life. It becomes very difficult thereafter to pick up a book by that author and ignore you had profound disagreements with his psyche. Yes, when one reads a book, the author is inviting one into his psyche.
And so it goes with Nabokov. This man teetered on the precipice of non-existence several times but feels that bombing Vietnam was the righteous thing to do. Now his books look to me like work of a literary contortionist completely lacking in any moral underpinning. Good thing he did not receive a Nobel prize - it is bad enough that one architect of the most intensive bombing campaign in history accepted a Nobel without any shame while his Vietnamese counterpart declined.
3
Beautiful and brilliant account of a misplaced genius whose identity could never be fully integrated in his psyche. Interesting that he supported McCarthyism and still held to the notion that all totalitarianism is bad. The article is riveting and timely.
4
The time I stumbled onto the source of the title for Pale Fire was probably my favorite reading experience, ever.
2
Oh please, tell us what you found!
1
As part Russian, I have an appreciation for Russian traditions and other cognitive stimulus. Some of their music makes my head alive with glee and spin with natural spirits.
But this situation is difficult. I cannot deal with it now.
1
I would have found it interesting to see what Russians nowadays think of Nabokov.
I enjoyed reading the article about him as I just recently reread Lolita driven to it by reading Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice. " At one level, "Death in Venice " seems to be about an older man's infatuation with a 12 year old boy so the two books have that in common.
While I do not know what Russians think of Nabokov, it seems that plenty of American readers hold it against Nabokov that he wrote a book such as Lolita that they perceive as a paean to pedophilia.
As an immigrant from a country that used to be behind the "Iron Curtain," that reaction of holding something against a work of art whose subject one does not like sounds like a page taken straight out of a Soviet playbook.
Personally, there is nothing that I find distasteful about Nabokov but I know that it is difficult for me to know that I like a work of art and yet intensely I dislike the creator. I can think of such works, one example being liking a book such as "The Tin Drum" by Gunther Grass.
No one, yet, argues about taking down the works of Picasso because, he was, to put it mildly a bad family man, or depopulating the great museums of the world by taking down the works of Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens married the supposedly most beautiful girl in his town, who, was his former wife's niece, when she was barely 16 and he was 53.
7
As someone who made child predation mainstream in literature, Nabokov humanized evil. It shows the moral relativism of people. It shows the high degree of moral malleability of literature. One persons crime is another person's obsession, worthy of empathy in the eyes of some.
2
That's like saying "M" the Fritz Lang/Peter Lorre film made child predation mainstream in film. Anything which exists in reality is a potential subject matter for artists and I would argue that both Lang and Nabokov treated their subject matter extremely intelligently while in the end delivering the moral message necessary.
14
@Robert
"Pale Fire" - one of the greatest works of American literature. And at turns hilarious:
Line 91: trivia
"Among these was a scrapbook in which over a period of years (1937-1949) Aunt Maud had been pasting clippings of an involuntarily ludicrous or grotesque nature.
"John Shade allowed me one day to memorandum the first and the last of the series; they happened to intercommunicate most pleasingly, I thought. Both stemmed from the same family magazine 'Life,' so justly famed for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex; hence one can well imagine how startled or titillated those families were.
"The first comes from the issue of May 10, 1937, p. 67, and advertises the Talon Trouser Fastener (a rather grasping and painful name, by the way). It shows a young gent radiating virility among several ecstatic lady-friends, and the inscription reads: You'll be amazed that the fly of your trousers could be so dramatically improved.
"The second comes from the issue of March 28, 1949, p. 126, and advertises Hanes Fig Leaf Brief. It shows a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge at a leering young Adam in rather ordinary but clean underwear, with the front of his advertised brief conspicuously and compactly shaded, and the inscription reads: 'Nothing beats a fig leaf.'"
5
Thanks for this fascinating and well crafted piece on Nabokov. It was always my pleasure to read any words he wrote, including the story of his childhood, "Speak Memory". I was always intrigued as to why the Nabokovs lived in hotels, and now I understand why.
8
Not only was Nabokov a wonderful writer, but he was a butterfly enthusiast and self-taught taxonomist of Lepidoptera. He actually curated the butterfly collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
11
What a wonderfully learned and well balanced account of the genius's travels and travails. How respectful of his peculiar perspective on some of the prickly points. How generous and understanding of him generally, a man not easy to understand, as it was in his interest to camouflage himself, through much of his life. The piece reminds of the time long ago when New York was a city of writers and editors whose brilliance shone around the world, before the money plague. Congratulations to Ms Schiff and to the New York Times for reminding us all what thoughtful is.
26
Indeed, NYC was the city of writers.
1
Schiff's biographies of Vera Nabokov and Saint Exupery are both wonderful as well!
I made an independent study of Nabokov as an undergraduate, and still struggle with the density of his wordsmithing. But there is some transcendent truth connected with him, his work--his butterfly quests. On a walk along a wooded road in upstate New York, I captured a tiger swallowtail butterfly resting on a tall plant between my bare hands then let it go (quite amazed, because I found difficulty even nabbing one with a net when younger): when I got back to the city, learned from the paper that was the day of Nabokov's death. And the butterfly "reappeared" years later during a discernment process at a Massachusetts monastery...
11
The best novel written in the English language was written by a Russian. Lolita. Don’t miss it. You’ll have read nothing if you have not read Lolita.
6
@Hummingbird
Close call but I'll choose Pale Fire.
1
Ms Shiff, when Nabakov writes, “My private tragedy,” he would say, had been to have had to “abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English,” Nabakov is not saying that his English is second-rate, he is saying that his adopted language, American English, is a "second rate brand"; your next sentence: "In his second-rate English he wrote several of the greatest works of the 20th century, . .." you imply that Nabakov was denigrating his command of English in the previous sentence. Perhaps you were being jocular? Anyone who knows Nabakov, knows he would never denigrate his command of English. But in his novels, he often makes fun of Americans command of their own language.
5
Exactly my reading of it— American English, or Americanese, as an Irish friend calls it, is the second-rate English.
2
@Marco Ribeiro
Misguided. Your parsing of the Nabokov quotation doesn't square with its inherent logic. Nabokov frequently downplayed his command of the English language. For example, “Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce’s champion game.”
1
What a brilliant essay Stacy.
I had read Nabokov in college but never appreciated him as much as I do now.
Although I have no anecdote as envy-inducing as the commenter who had him as a prof, I can offer one thing.
If you have not yet purchased The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov -in some British editions: The Collected Stories. do so immediately.
Sixty-five stories including 13 never published in English (trans by the son). I have dragged this around for a decade now and still love to dive in and out of its magnificence.
Might I humbly suggest First Love - if you read it as part of your AP English then coming back to it as a mature? adult is haunting and amazing at the same time.
10
We should all be eternally grateful that he and Vera finally emigrated to the United States, and with the kind help from refugee organizations and Russian expats, were able to find an apartment and jobs.
I recently bought (used) copies of Brian Boyd's two volume biography of Nabokov. I can't wait to delve in. How he could be a master novelist in both Russian and English is beyond me.
I can still remember laughing out loud as he played with words in his introduction to Speak, Memory. This autobiographical account was first written in English, revised for a Russian version and then translated back into English and further expanded.
"This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before."
12
does anyone use a hand-cranked pencil sharpener anymore?
ticonderoga, ticonderoga
4
@peggy
Yes, but not those pencils.
Have you read Galya Diment's book – Pniniad – about Marc Szeftel, who taught at Cornell with Nabokov and was said to be the original of Pnin?
Nabokov's best work is Mashenka, which he wrote in Berlin. The book has been translated into English, by him I believe. I am a native Russian speaker, and am often surprised to hear people go on and on about his wonderful English. His English is a creative and lovely fabrication, but it not the English of a native speaker, and for that we are thankful, in a sense, as it conveys something new and magical. His Russian writings are superb, however, and his style in Russian is magnificent, that often written in those early Berlin years, immitating Ivan Bunin, whom he revered. The story of his emigre wanderings is poignant and touching, but there are a thousand stories like that in the Naked City. But the fact that he would not affiliate himself with the emigre experience, is most revealing - his sense of superiority, of exclusivity, of diminishing all that which he considered beneath him sets him apart more than anything.
14
@MTS These comments seem to be invigorating mnemonic connections... yours reminds me that for many years (perhaps indefinitely) I found something more compelling in work translated into English, such as Garcia-Marquez (or even The Little Prince, the Bible, Kafka) than typical American English writing... and when Nabokov's writing entered the shelf it was compelling in the same way
1
An interesting account of a great writer. It is just sad, though, that even (or especially) such a great writer could not refrain from the cardinal sin of envy. Pasternak's work is no apologia for communism and has great beauty of its own. It's also too bad that Americans confuse Pasternak's novel with the sloshy Hollywood trivialization of it.
7
@Oriflamme The movie with Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, and Geraldine Chaplin, was wonderful.
4
The fact that Pasternak was not allowed to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Soviet authorities despite being the most famous and popular Soviet author shows that his political leanings were considered dangerous by the regime.
2
Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera spent their last years near Lake Geneva in Montreux, Switzerland. When asked if he regretted leaving America. He replied: "I miss America, even Miss America."
32
@Diogenes
I just got around to reading this. Thanks a lot for sharing this quote/quip, reminiscent of the word-play of the inimitable Groucho Marx.
2
And Nabokov's rich memory of Russia blazes out of "Ada".
If you haven't read it, you're in for the treat of your life.
7
In noting Nabokov's centenary of leaving his homeland, Ms. Schiff invites the question of which set of his experiences from that date were seminal in his work. No doubt the searing escape from Crimea colored his impressions of life in Europe and his leaving at the outbreak of WW2, as well as subsequent returns.
His stunning literary output in America sets him apart from writers in exile in critical acclaim and popularity.
It's curious that Schiff does not include material on Nabokov's deep and rich career in entomology; reputed to be a taxonomist without peer. I found one commenter here who was a student of his at Cornell to be partcularly insightful, that he advised paying close atttention to the natural world. Nabokov was such a gifted intellect, of surpassing width, writer, linguist, scientist, scholar, wit; even as skilled an essayist as Schiff could hardly do justice to the man in 1500 words; a dazzling piece anyway.
9
It is unfortunate that Americans only learn about Russian writers who opposed the Russian people's socialist Revolution. The extraordinary modernist poet Mayakovsky or the Tolstoy-scale novels of Sholokov about the Cossacks, for just two major examples, are pretty much unknown in our country, to the detriment of our culture . . . Contrary to your columnist, the Bolsheviks did not kill people senselessly, but because their government of the people was being attacked by the armies of the reactionary Whites and those of Britain, France, Japan and, oh yes, the US. The new Soviet Communist government needed the "bourgeois specialists" and actually privileged them. It was the bourgeois intellectuals as a class who rejected and did everything they could to defeat the working class state. However, the best of the intelligentsia, like Gorky and Pavlov, at first opposed the October Revolution then became loyal supporters.
6
As someone who had to travel outside the US before learning of the true history of the Russian revolution I am happy that you have made such an eloquent and honest response.
1
@Red AlloverAnd these intellectuals who joined the Revolution mostly were executed or came to regret it,
as do fellow travelers of all totalitarian regimes. You know this, of course, and your pose is simply provocation, as seen by your nom de guerre. But we're on to you and have been always.
12
In fact, not only were my slaughtered peasant ancestors not intellectual elites, they were fairly illiterate.
3
This excellent piece provides a glimpse of the Russian presence in Germany, and from other sources, one knows of the German presence in imperial Russia. Then, shortly after Nabokov left Germany, there are the titanic WW II battles between the Russians and the Germans. This is a cultural paradox that I cannot fathom.
1
This incredible writer!? "The incredible Nabokov--Sirin," as Solzhenitsyn calls him.
Years ago, I visited my Mom--then living in a retirement community. She went to bed. I stayed up, looking at some text books that had belonged to my father--a sometime English professor. I came across a long excerpt from "Pnin."
Talking about a pencil sharpener. "How it goes Ticonderoga Ticonderoga--taking bites of the sweet, yellow wood." And "ends up spinning soundlessly in an ethereal void as we all must."
I laid down the book. My stars! I thought--my stars! I had forgotten what a a marvelous writer this was. Impossible to forget such writing--but I had. Well--I remember it now.
Poem coming up. I doubt (meaning no offense) if a day went by when (at some point) Nabokov did not remember Russia. His lost homeland. In dreams, maybe, if nowhere else:
"How mobile is the bed on these
Nights of gesticulating trees
When the rain clatters fast--
The tin toy rain with dapper hoof,
Trotting upon an endless roof,
Traveling into the past.
"Upon old roads the steeds of rain
Slip and slow down and speed again
Through many a tangled year
But they can never reach the last
Dip at the bottom of the past
Because the sun is there."
Get it? You wake up. The dreams dissolve.
I can't speak for Nabokov's Russian--
--but his ENGLISH?
Beyond praise. Wonderful!
Read it if you haven't. There's still time.
Lots of time.
23
I agree with other commenters. An outstanding writer, I do not care for his political views, nor for most of views on other writers however. He was notoriously dismissive of many USA-born/bred writers, not least William Faulkner, one of the greatest of novelists writing in any language.
6
Interested in more by Stacy Schiff on the Nabokovs? She published, "Vera (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov)" in 1999.
12
The Bolsheviks were nasty and totalitarian, but the real lesson of 1917 is the failure of the liberals. The Russian people overthrew the czar because they were tired of fighting World War I. Yet when the liberals came to power in the February Revolution, they decided to continue the war and even launch new offensives against Germany. This destroyed their popular support and caused people to flock to the Bolsheviks, whose first promise was Peace. Centrist liberals today are too comfortable with the military-industrial complex and foreign conflicts. They need to reject nationalism and militarism, or people will turn to the Left.
17
My fellow liberals pitiable and dangerous attachment to totalitarianism (as long as it has a lefty slant) has, I see, a long long pedigree. God bless this genius for not supporting it.
8
I was an engineering student at Cornell. Nabokov's course was one of my most memorable academic experiences. His wife sat in back!
17
Right now, about 3/4 through Lolita. It's an intriguing story.
The earlier part is quite funny before there is an actual physical relationship between Humbert and Lo. Then it's a bit jarring, to be sure.
But for me, the finest writer of our lifetime is Phillip Roth. If you haven't read American Pastoral, I believe you're missing a remarkable novel...very disturbing but beautifully written and filled with powerful ideas.
I understand there will be two Nobel prizes for literature this year, as there was none awarded last year. Perhaps Roth will win. If anyone deserves such an award, he does...as a beautiful, lyrical writer.
3
@Peter Lobel
Pedofilia is "a bit jarring"?
3
@Peter Lobel
Agree with your assessment. Alas, Mr. Roth is deceased and will never receive the Nobel award he most certainly deserved.
4
@Peter Lobel
I'd say Sabbath's Theater is better than American Pastoral, in terms of sheer literary joy.
I'd include both Martin Amis and Richard Powers among the great living prose stylists in English. Amis is not a world-class writer, but he has moments of amazing style. Powers is known as a writer of big ideas, but he's often a terrific stylist as well.
1
A very beautifully written account of the personal travails of a miraculously subtle master of language. I was once familiar with Nabokov's own story, from much reading in college, but I had not revisited its troubled path for a long time. His peculiar combination of unyielding toughness with a pitiable vulnerability, in the face of cataclysmic circumstances, amazes anew.
135
@Elizabeth Ellis Hurwitt Yes. Nabokov was once asked by an interviewer what he had learned in his career. 'Pity,' he said. And his works are suffused with pity, often for the characters we see only indirectly - Lolita herself and her mother; or the unhappy Queen Disa, John Shade, his wife, and especially Shade's daughter, all in 'Pale Fire'. Our experience of their very being is mosaic and fugitive, pieced together from fragments and glimpses, filtered through the unreliable narrator. They seem to be fighting, generally in vain, to emerge into full existence, against forces beyond their control -- much like their creator's early life, but his against real rather than metaphorical oppression.
46
The NYT should run a weekly/monthly article on Nabokov. Indeed, it could even be written by the ghost of Nabokov.
7
@Anti-Marx
Presumably, the man who disliked his marks in school is not an advocate for the success of the bolshevik cadre that finally seized government power in 1918 in then Saint Petersburg, when no other group appeared to be willing to do so, after the abdication of the Tsar. It took the prompting of Ulyanov, arriving from Switzerland through Germany by train, to push his colleagues to act.
No surprise that Nabokov was anti-soviet and anti-bolshevik. Certainly against his own marks in school, akin to Mr Anti-Marks here. His family was part of the vanishingly small group of aristocrats who lived in mind-boggling idleness and splendor, while the hundreds of millions of peasantry lived in the mud.
2
@Wendell Murray
I don't live in idleness. I work out 11 hours a week and have a PhD. I don't drink or watch sports. I'm always in motion. I run 30+ miles a week and read (now John Rawls and Dickens).
The main splendor that I crave is 5 inches of fresh powder and a morning temperature above 20 F (so my hands don't freeze skiing).
1
What was with the glorification of pedophilia via Lolita though?
3
@MaryTheresa
Have you read Lolita? If you have, then you haven't read it carefully. It never glorifies pedophilia, but it's also true that it's doesn't read as 200+ page condemnation of pedophilia. Narrow minds tend to conflate a lack of outraged condemnation as endorsement (or "glorification"), but this simply is not so. Nabokov's work is not about preaching moral/political values of any kind; to read it as such is to fundamentally misunderstand it.
29
@J
Yes, I have, and yes I did read it carefully.
I will bet a million dollars you are male.
It is about a Man who seduces a young girl.
Maybe you're into that.
PS: I also read for the Continental Paper at Oxford (the big one in England!). So I've been to the academic rodeo, and narrow is a word nobody would use to describe my mind.
3
Yes, it is about pedophilia. But how does it all work out for the characters in the book? I wouldn't call it "glorification" in any sense.
17
Interesting: color of eyes: champlain. Champlain blue, I guess; how odd that the U.S. Department of Labor used a color wheel with such specificity. I can imagine a police radio crackling: "Suspect has champlain eyes, bistre hair, in a celadon suit and hat."
Our perp writer may have been charged with child porn for "Lolita," both then and now. It is salacious, and discomfiting for a parent to peruse. Its nonchalant style and tone made it all the more horrific. Surely, Henry James would have deemed it beyond the pale, unacceptable in polite company.
But it was extremely well-written. My Puritan sensibilities just cannot accept its widespread acceptability.
4
@Jim Muncy
Champlain was the name of the steamship. It says his eyes were gray.
9
@Jim Muncy
The name of the steamship is Champlain.
The eyes were Grey.
6
Looks like the aristocracy the Bolsheviks were happy to get rid of.
1
Two words: "Pale Fire."
7
@James
Ha, yes indeed.
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
1
@James — you’re right! Those ARE two words! That’s one more word than “Lolita”, and the exact same number as “Speak, Memory”. I could go on, but I don’t want to be accused of showing off my counting skills, which I learned as a child.
1
The end of the third paragraph sounds like what the U.S. is suffering today.
2
Ironic that this article contains this quote--"'Nothing,' he would roar later, 'bores me more than political novels and the literature of social unrest.' He was, he enlightened his representative, neither Sinclair Lewis nor Upton Sinclair. (Ultimately he tossed the two over the cliff together, as 'Upton Lewis')"--but then proceeds to appropriate Nabokov's story for exactly the sort of banal political warfare he would have despised.
2
Great article, reviving my interest in Nabokov. I will shortly head for my book case to retrieve my copy of Lolita.
6
“Nabakov claimed not to be able to distinguish a Republican from a Democrat.” Perhaps that was because, as Gore Vidal was fond of saying, “America has one political party—with two right wings.”
8
I read the article with interest, and it provided insights into the famous writer's personal life. Well-written as well.
But why include the subtitle, "How did the experience shape his writing?" when the article does not touch on this at all?
1
Nabokov was one of my teachers at Cornell. He was interested in my not because I knew anything about literature but because i was one of the few students who was doing advanced Russian. He taught me to pay attention to the details of nature as well as to big ideas. My biggest regret, for many years, was that for family reasons I had to leave Cornell and could not assist him in the translation of Eugene Onegin.
159
@george p fletcher I just missed him at Cornell. The elegant and lovable MH Abrams and his wife, Ruth, used to tell a story that Nabokov had asked permission to sit in their adolescent daughter's bedroom to soak up the details and atmosphere----when the daughter was out of the house, of course. They really appreciated their indirect contribution to _Lolita_.
18
@george p fletcher
A friend, Calvin Edwards, taught English at Cornell when Nabokov was there. He told us it was always Vera who did the driving.
I'm curious why Nabokov was so bitterly opposed to Freud.
5
@CTR Goodness, today he would've been hanged in the public square for that alone.
3
Nabokov was a wordsmith. Pasternak was a story teller.
Literature needs both.
And kudos to Stacy Schiff for an exceptionally well written/researched essay...
210
@HapinOregon
My take is a bit different. Nabokov is a wordsmith dominated by intellect, and Pasternak is a poet dominated by feelings.
20
@GS
Nabokov could be too smart for his own good. In the first chapter of LOLITA a minor character mentions the death of a young woman, referred to by her husband's name, in childbirth. Only if you read the novel twice do you realize that the young woman was Lolita. Many readers miss it. Nabokov must have enjoyed the trick of hiding the title character's death in code instead of making it clear what happened to her. He was not a "storyteller".
5
I stand in absolute wonder at writers like Conrad and Nabokov, who not only mastered English but changed literature in the language forever.
150
@Bronwyn The author Ardyth Kennelly, in her forthcoming memoir, has an amusing metaphor for Conrad's English: "Nabokov is the only one I can think of who really pulled that off [coming to an English-speaking country and jumping right into belles lettres], and even then I can hear a faint accent. Joseph Conrad is always given as an example, but his English is like a car that’s been totaled, fixed up so it looks okay, but when you ride in it you know by the seat of your pants that there’s something wrong, some kind of an underlying shakiness."
Great writers both, but Nabokov is in a class of his own.
12
@Bronwyn . . . and Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian writer who wrote about the wars there from Chicago
2
Wonderful article. Nabokov's writing about the West in Lolita is convincing and impressive enough that Lolita made it onto my PhD exam list in Western (American) Studies. Anyone who hasn't yet read Pale Fire should do so.
11
Let us not forget the short stories. Every time I read "Signs and Symbols," I am held in abeyance above the world.
Thank you for this article.
7
@thinking
Really?
When I read "Signs and Symbols", I see a perfect blueprint for a 'chilling' Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode.
Apricot, grape, beach plum, quince and the final, almost humorous, crab apple.
3
When I was young, I loved Nabokov's literary razzle dazzle and his acute sensitivity to the sensory aspects of life.
When I grew up, I found him a surprisingly simple psychologist with rather limited insight into the hearts and minds of his characters.
A man who sees infinite shades of mauve in the heart of a rose, but too much black & white, good & bad, artists & everybody else, among human beings.
I grew up and discovered Chekhov and have never wavered in my love for his kaleidoscopic humanity.
Nabokov puts art and artists haughtily above all.
In Chekhov, artists are as variable, flawed, recognizably human as everybody else.
23
How wonderful to take a few moments to consider a favorite writer.
Lolita was such a revelation to me. To write so beautifully of a monster, to make you empathize with him, see him even as a man manipulated by a cunning femme fatale, and then with a few masterful words bring you face to face again with the terrible inhumanity of his crime and your own failure to forget Herbert is a predator and Lolita a child. Nabokov was an artist of the first order.
When I think of Nabokov, I think first of the 1950s pink rubber bathtub shower adapter in Humbert’s wife’s-to-be bathroom. That image stuck for some reason; Nabokov’s humorous reference to middle American schlock. And then a photo of a gleeful Nabokov in a field with a butterfly net: Nabokov was never Humbert.
Others commenting here remind me that Speak Memory sits unread on my bookshelf.
80
@Chickpea
_Speak, Memory_, which recounts in depth the material in Schiff's fine article, is one of the great literary autobiographies, as good as any of VN's novels, with the exception of _Lolita_ and _Pale Fire_.
14
@Chickpea. Speak, Memory is one of the most beautifully written books in English. Dust it off and savor the language!
9
@Mary Kovis Watson, agree. In Nabokov's autobiography, his astounding capacity for memory itself is on display - details of a morning from childhood, too accurate to be manufactured, appear on the page as if translated from a diary written contemporaneously.
A prodigious talent for recall served Nabokov no less than Einstein - two geniuses with vast stores of detailed experience from which to draw inspiration.
Speak, Memory and Nabokov's collected short stories are among his best, Lolita included.
5
I'll add my kudos and appreciation for this fine column, as well as the many thoughtful comments. Rarely if ever do I read the comments, but the subject compelled me, and I was rewarded.
19
Ditto, ditto
2
@Alexander Zwissler
I love the comments! Sometimes they are boring but sometimes they are great and sometimes even fun. I swear I think it's the comments that keep me paying for the NYT's.
13
@lh
What paper has better comments? None, I think. Unfortunately there are often too many to get through them all.
1
i'm an immigrant myself, speaking and writing in three languages. thinking in all three. English is an acquired language for all of us. I struggle even to this day. I came here out of the war in 1946. I connect with Vladimir Nabokov. I keep a butterfly net in my bedroom to remember him.
48
OK, I'll say it: after Shakespeare and Dante, VN was arguably the greatest literary genius ever. Not saying he was a greater novelist than his illustrious countrymen Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Nor did he obviously surpass all the greatest, whether novelist or poet, of those who preceded him (from Cervantes, Flaubert, Melville, and Joyce to Byron, Wordsworth, Stevens and Eliot). Just saying that perfect sentence after perfect sentence, glistening word after glistening word, with all his puns, word-games, allusions, learned references, hidden quotations, and embedded jokes, no one since Shakespeare and Dante was more exciting or fun to read.
39
@DLS Methinks you may not know Nabokov as well as you think. He detested the idea that his novels were filled with symbolism, allusions and codes. He once failed a student who tried to claim that the word "green" in a Jane Austen novel symbolized "hope". He called him the "the dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher." If you like to read what Mr. Nabokov has to say on the subject, I suggest reading his review of William Woodin Rowe's book "Nabokov's Deceptive World". The review was published in 1971 in The New York Review of Books.
11
@DLS Agreed!!
3
@Edward
oops, I guess I overlooked the part where I said anything about symbolism and codes. I was talking about the enjoyment of his puns, word-games, literary jokes, etc., and his pure verbal ingenuity and excellence, as especially in Pale Fire, Despair, Lolita, Speak, Memory, or for that matter everything he ever wrote.
14
I love Nabokov. I count that as a great achievement, since he's a very difficult man even to like.
My favorites are The Gift (Dar), Invitation to a Beheading, and Bend Sinister.
He was of the first émigré generation in America, and rather typical of the cohort. My parents were of the same milieu.
He gave up on Russia. His resentment of Pasternak is in part envy of those who did not do so.
He ridiculed such hopeful events as The Thaw, and especially Khrushchev's opening to America in 1958. One of the symbols of that time was the triumph in Russia of the young Texan pianist, Van Cliburn. Rejecting the general excitement, Nabokov dismissed Pasternak's masterpiece as "Dr. Van Cliburn".
He took his intimate knowledge of the Russian catastrophe as license to straighten Americans out about politics. Thus, for example, the McCarthyism mentioned in the article.
This is an arrogant mistake: America might be democratic rather than aristocratic, and vulgar rather than refined. However, it is an organism of the complexity of Russia, and calls, similarly, for many years of acquaintance to begin to understand it.
I tire of hearing that Augie March is an American. Similarly, Nabokov's declaration of being American leaves me cold. Comfort food for anxious newcomers, such boasts celebrate the end of a journey which should not end.
History doesn't end when we come here.
More important: Russia doesn't end.
As the British song has it: Just you wait and see.
12
@alyosha
Ada is my favorite.
5
Nice article. His autobiography's good. He seemed to me to write (in English) as if a metal worker, bending the words into shape, and finding the ones that best joined up with others, handling words as if material things. I wonder what the connection was between him and Stravinsky as it seemed Stravinsky composed in something of same manner, that bending, twisting, molding, flowing manner. Even just hearing about Nabokov, not having read anything by him, leaves one astonished. The butterflies, the ability to switch languages and still write with genius (like Conrad), the whole Lolita thing, the traveling the U.S., the writing on note cards and his wife typing everything up for him, the constant ability to adapt and to seemingly have infinite resource, exist like a king no matter how poor, no matter environment. You can imagine him, if with a couple hundred years more of life, having lived a number of other lives, able to have been a genius in a number of fields.
19
@Daniel12
Giroud, V. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music. NY: Oxford University Press, 2015.
"Composer, cultural diplomat, and man about town, Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) counted among his intimate friends everyone from Igor Stravinsky to George Kennan. While today he is overshadowed by his more famous cousin Vladimir, Nicolas Nabokov was during his lifetime an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War and admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for his political acumen and his talents as a composer.
The first-ever biography of Nabokov follows the fascinating stages of his life a privileged childhood before the Revolution; the beginnings of a promising musical career lauched under the aegis of Diaghilev;.....
11
Surprised there is no mention of his time on Meade Street in Ashland Oregon where he finished Lolita (1953) and studied butterflies in the Siskiyou Mountains.
11
@Betsy Smith
Having attended college in Ashland, I always wondered where he lived there.
Thanks!
3
I have never heard the pre-revolutionaries and Lenin being referred to as Liberals. It is odd choice and Ms. Schiff uses it twice...I question her usage. The current Republican administration has weaponized the label while suggesting we Liberals like to kill fully developed babies, allow dead people to vote and are criminally un-American.
I don't like it at all and hope she finds a better word "next" time around.
4
@Lisa - You may have misread, and the author wasn't very clear. The first revolution of 1917 was in February and was essentially "liberal" (Mensheviks), social democrats, and the Czar abdicated. Lenin arrived from abroad later that year, and the Bolsheviks gained power in the second, October revolution; the Bolsheviks were definitely not liberal.
15
@Lisa
How about "anti-capitalists"?
1
@Lisa She wasn't calling Lenin a liberal. Lenin replaced the liberals. The point was that there was a liberal government between the czar and Lenin.
11
I believe Nabokov read and wrote in English before he did in Russian.
4
@Dan K That is probably true as most aristocrats grew up speaking French and also studying German or English. Russian was spoken by serfs who were their slaves for centuries and looked down upon even after they were freed.
1
The great one. Nabokov was probably the greatest writer to write in two different languages. The best non-native English language writer ever (Conrad a close second).
13
@Benjo
Conrad (the subject on my Lit Minor Senior Thesis way back in the day), IMHO, was the better storyteller. Nabokov had a better way with words...
6
@HapinOregon
Hmmm, Conrad knew the magic of the story, but not of words. Nabokov, just the other way around.
4
@HapinOregon
I seem to remember Nabokov characterizing himself as a virtuoso reader. Made sense to me. I find his works are clever in that he seems to have assimilated the best things he encountered from closely reading masterful writers. I never would put him too high on my list of masterful writers (Dickens, Faulkner, Austen, Eliot, Kundera, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Twain, Woolf, McCarthy are among my favorites).
1
We should not be so arrogant as to presume that all immigrants want or choose to come here. Lately people seem to have forgotten what the word "refugee" actually means. We are lucky to receive those whose brilliance would shine anywhere just as brightly, if given a chance, like Vladimir Nabokov's. Speak, Memory and Lolita are two of the most beautiful books ever to appear in English. I don't have a great deal of interest in parsing Nabokov's personality, though I appreciate Stacy Schiff's insights as to how his experiences in Russia and with the Bolsheviks influenced his political views in America. This sympathetic and engaging article has inspired me to read some more Nabokov!
26
@ladywriter Lolita is a love story. All the other flak surrounding it is trivial? Distracting? Something, I don’t know. Anyways, if what Jeremy Renner says in “Arrival” is true, that learning a new language is rewiring your brain, then Vladimir must’ve had a lot of wire up there. What really puzzles me is that he spoke English from when he was young, but didn’t write in it until much later. I wonder when he started reading it. And the big puzzle is how does speaking/reading/writing produce idioms, idiomatic expressions, metaphor, parody, etc.? I mean I’ve been speaking/reading/writing English for 71 years, those things are easy for me. How did they become easy for him? A puzzle. Anyways, read Ada. Another love story.
10
@Robert M. Koretsky
Is Yiddish a written language? I should know, since I'm a yid. Yiddish is clearly a very idiomatic language, but does it have a written form different from Hebrew?
1
@Anti-Marx-Yiddish used the Hebrew alphabet and yes it is written.
2
i'm delighted to see Nabokov remembered, despite Ms. Schiff's tendency to let allusion slip into incomprehensibility ("a cunning act of currency conversion;" it was not the book, but its profits, that propelled N back to europe; etc.).
sociologists have documented that the effect of economic or social upheaval on a child depends on the child's age at the time. it's worth noting that nabokov fled russia at age 19. his pugnacious persistence may be anchored in that experience of challenge at the threshold of majority.
it's a jewel in the reputation of my alma mater that Cornell provided N with a home and a post where he could freely write and translate -- and produce some remarkable lectures on literature that remain (with Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis") superb examples of careful reading.
"Speak Memory" is a delightful reminiscence of his childhood and teenage years, and i find in the episode where N abandoned a sorely grieving friend to pursue butterflies -- and wept bitterly at the shame of his compulsion -- as the writer's portal to the mind of Humbert Humbert.
Ms. Schiff omits that Playboy published a few of N's works, and the teenage effect of encountering his prose mingled with full color pulchritude is difficult to convey. the world contained many more things than the child had anticipated.
20
@drollere
I agree with you that the butterfly compulsion episode is very telling in Speak, Memory.
The Mademoiselle episode also begs close scrutiny. Nabokov has to work so HARD to give this pathetic, sad woman a center, a soul. Why was it near impossible for him to see her as a human being?
Also, the topic of Nabokov's homosexual brother Sergei is fascinating. The amused and disgust-tinged bafflement with which both he and his father observe this young man is so terribly sad.
Championing his bravery when confronting the Nazis, and his chronicling his death in a concentration camp, Nabokov seems to be attempting to make up for his lifelong neglect of and estrangement from Sergei.
Like Mademoiselle, Sergei never seems completely real to Nabokov, despite the microscopic examination of externals.
Maybe Vera is real, and his son Dmitri. So real he needs to concoct some kind of half religious, half Einsteinian mumbo jumbo at the memoir's end to somehow ensure a continuation of their love.
I think Nabokov was a queer, lonely duck under all the pompous pronouncements, deeply scarred, understandably so, from his historic and dramatic displacements.
6
Very interesting. Your last paragraph appears to be telling us that, for all the family and Russia went through, Nabokov and his wife, even in their later years, still largely retained the sentiments and opinions of elite, wealthy Russians of the Czarist era. After reading his work decades ago, I concluded that living in America had given him a degree of creative freedom that he never would have found in Europe or Russia. is an unrecognized masterpiece.
11
@Robert
Something was deleted by the NY Times site. I wrote:
"Pnin is an unrecognized masterpiece."
(For those who are curious, apparently if you use "less than" and "greater than" signs, the site deletes whatever you've put between them.)
7
@Robert Because in HTML, those angle brackets indicate that what inside them is a formatting command, rather than text to be published. This reminds me of a hilarious gag in Pale Fire:
"Frank has acknowledged the safe return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention in my Preface—and this I willingly do—that I alone am responsible for any mistakes in my commentary. Insert before a professional. A professional proofreader has carefully rechecked the printed text of the poem against the phototype of the manuscript, and has found a few trivial misprints I had missed; that has been all in the way of outside assistance."
2
Fascinating article! I'm fortunate enough to own a signed copy of "The Witches", Ms. Schiff's eloquent and penetrating examination of the Salem witch trials, and this reminds me of her remarkable facility with words. And how I have to read much more Russian fiction.
11
Excellent piece Ms. Schiff. Thank you for making my day.
12
What a fun read! Thank you Stacy!!
5
No question that Nabokov was a rare genius but I confess I always imagined that he wrote Lolita with the aid of a thesaurus.
6
Speak, Memory: the sentences are so beautiful
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@peggy
One most treasured book. Mine is dirty with thumb turnings.
1
From
Nabokov at Cornell
Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Véra, and son Dmitri arrived in Ithaca on July 1, 1948. Nabokov began his duties as Professor of Russian Literature in the fall, teaching three courses on the subject, one in translation and two in Russian. By the end of his more than ten years at Cornell, he would become famous as the author of Lolita and Pnin and known on campus as a lecturer not to be missed.
While at Cornell, Nabokov wrote some of the richest and most enduring works of his career. In 1953 alone he had five writing projects in process. He was well into a translation of The Song of Igor's Campaign, a monumental translation of Eugene Onegin, and a translation of his Conclusive Evidence into Russian. At the same time, the outline for Pnin was taking shape, and Lolita was an all but completed typescript.
When Nabokov left Ithaca in February of 1959, he planned to return to his teaching position at Cornell after a year long sabbatical. But as profits from Lolita continued to multiply, he realized the full scope of the financial freedom won by his new success.
n September of 1959 he wrote to Cornell University president Deane Malott to formally tender his resignation.
The Nabokovs returned to Europe and established residence in Montreux, Switzerland. Although they thought of visiting Ithaca more than once over the following decade, they would never see Cornell again.
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/lolita/cornell/index.html
22
A fine piece of analysis of the evolution and contributions of Vladimir Nabokov. It also is another reminder of what a senseless tragedy WWI was, perhaps most so for the inhabitants of the former Russian Empire and their descendants.
10
I never got Nabokov, though I've known people who -- caring little for books and reading -- raved about his fiction, particularly Lolita and Ada. It's almost as if Nabokov's style dazzled them into thinking they had joined a cognoscenti of sorts, though the notion would have horrified them because, other than Nabokov, they had no time for books.
8
@Bob Nabokov, ironically, had never considered Lolita and/or Ada his best or even second best works. He wrote it purely to make money, and boy did he ever.
8
@Bob I discovered Nabokov thanks to Lolita and went on to build a small library of his works. I continue to find him deeply satisfying, well worth re-reading over the years. I'm sure I'm one of a legion of readers who love him for his deep sensitivity to the human condition--and for his eloquence, not to mention his wicked sense of humor. Try him again?
22
There is always somebody who has to tear down every well-respected artist no matter how talented. It is a symptom of what David Mamet called "anti-Stratfordianism" in relation to people who said that Shakespeare didn't really write his plays. By tearing the great artist down, they try to make themselves even greater, as the true arbiters of truth and beauty.
6
Nabokov was a selfish man, as any student of his wife's life knows. He was a clever writer, as anyone with the patience to read Lolita will learn. He developed galloping ineptitude, as a writer, as any of the readers of Ada would agree (perhaps 3 or 4 this year?).
In all that work, I think only Pnin and Pale Fire deserve to endure. He made a bundle on Lolita, but really, who could read it now and not be repelled on many levels.
Ms. Schiff has no room for the later rancor which marked the relationship of Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. The story is, however, both more interesting and, as a cautionary tale, more worthy of study than much of Nabokov's career (hunting butterflies not excepted).
I suppose there are scholars who dine out on Nabokov's life work. If they don't know meretricious fluff when they read it, what did they learn in school?
14
@eric williams what about "Glory"? or "Mashenka"? or his short stories ("Clod, Castle, Lake")? C'mon, man, cut the guy some slack here.
4
Thank you for mentioning “Glory.” While I, like so many, came to Nabokov via “Lolita,” it is “Glory” that has become my favorite. While I freely acknowledge that it will never be considered his best novel (and it’s certainly not), I’ve never failed to be brought to tears by Sonia’s anguished cries upon learning of Martin’s final act.
6
@eric williams, There is nothing more subjective than our individual responses to art, so you are entitled to yours. Still, you have my pity for not being able to enjoy and appreciate ADA as the late masterpiece it is.
9
His greatest novel? Invitation to a Beheading. Is it an actual prison, or a prison of the protagonist's own choosing? Are the prisoner and jailer one and the same?
6
I'll pick Pale Fire personally.
5
Such complex and complicated lives.
2
Bulgakov is another great story, and maybe the more adventurous writer. Crazy times and even better authours
9
Against overwhelming odds, Nabokov’s refusal to feel sorry for himself is testimony to the bravery found in his writing.
And this article is a tough piece of writing itself.
20
An "American writer, born in Russia" -- and few have taken more delight in the English language. (Well, there was that other guy, Will Somebody, but he was a Brit.)
Let's read aloud from the first page of "Lolita":
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."
By the time I get that far, the spell is cast and it's almost impossible for me to stop reading.
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@jim emerson
Oh, yes and yes again.
1
@jim emerson One thing I never noticed until now - that "t' is a Russian "t." English-speakers tap the roof of the mouth with the tongue, Russians tap the front teeth.
7
@jim emerson Sorry, that opener was the equivalent of clickbait. The rest of the book was much better.
1
beautifully evoked, as is everything that stacy schiff writes. one refugee post script: while trying to escape berlin, then paris, just ahead of the nazis, nabokov had to teach himself to write in english (he learned to speak it as a child, but had never written in that tongue), hoping to have a life and career in america. the result, of course, is that most nabokovian of works, the real life of sebastian knight.
11
Surprised there was no mention of Nabokov and his wife's time in Ithaca, NY and Cornell University, prior to the publication of Lolita...and his interest in butterflies as well.
13
@Douglas Scott Treado
I'm a big fan of Nabokov's novels. In college, I was a big fan of Pynchon. If I am correct, while at Cornell, Pynchon studied with Nabokov. It's not difficult to see similarities between Pale Fire and The Crying of Lot 49.
4
What a beautiful essay!
10
As a native speaker, and a semi-proficient English reader, I have read all his works in both tongues. Despite the man himself being quite shallow. petty. even atavistically / chauvinistically narrow-mined, his works are brilliant. Very few of the American readers realize that what Russia cir. 1914-1916 looked like is very much what America does today: seemingly solid, mighty, and hegemonic, while in reality a colossus on clay feet. What intellectuals like Nabokov underwent then (read: emigration, poverty, and defeat) could be the future of today's intelligentsia yet again. Nabokov's entire body of work thereafter was nothing but reliving that experience in different forms over and over.
24
@Yulia Berkovitz
Yes, Yulia, you are right. The parallels are there for anyone to see.
Somehow time has overlapped itself, bringing revolutionary Russia to the US, 100 years later.
1968 was our 1905, when a revolution tried to be born, but did not quite succeed. Students for a Democratic Society was our Narodnya Volya.
When is our 1917?
Think:
* In the world's greatest meritocracy the wealthy buy their children a place in college.
* Income inequality and wealth inequality have now reached levels last seen in the 1930s
* The presidency is the hands of a visibly unstable autocrat with a fragile ego
* World crises surround us, many of our own making.
We've all heard that proverb: History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
12
@Yulia Berkovitz, I see some parallels. Much depends upon the military, the police and the secret police. If they remain apolitical if the untoward happened, there will be cause for hope.
4
"... a one-party system in which hacks and henchmen replaced the competent and qualified.... On seizing power the Bolsheviks made their first victims the intellectuals who had preceded them."
This sounds a bit familiar, does it not?
It's not hard to imagine what Nabokov would have thought of Trump. I wonder what he would have written in this era, what he would have said about America today.
51
The subtitle is misleading. This essay tells us nothing about Nabokov's writing. It focuses on his life events and drops in repeated denunciations of leftist governments, many of which Nabokov shared. However, Schiff is as bad at history as was Nabokov. The authoritarian government in Egypt is not a distortion of a leftist revolution.The left never got power in Egypt, and the current government is the creation of a military coup.
27
@Richard Lachmann. The irony of history here is that all leftist govt's end up authoritarian. Case in point: Madouro, Stalin, Macrone. The list goes on and on.
4
@Yulia Berkovitz
Nonsense! The dictators you list as not leftist Liberals! They are dictators plan and simple. Shame on you.
4
@Lisa. Riiight. Stalin was not a socialist, neither were/are Macrone and Madouro. I’ll have what you are having for dinner, Lisa.
3
This piece does not allude to Nabokov's final 15 years in Montreux, Switzerland, nor his fascination with butterflies.
2
Lolita is the creepiest and one of the most amazing novels I have ever read. I can't believe this guy thought his English was second rate!
12
@Sarah
Hi did not think so. He thought that American English was second rate.
6
@Natasha Rukhin
Ha! I always suspected that was what he meant! Doubtless he would have taken pleasure in some mistakenly believing he was expressing humility. But I also doubt that the put-down was a complete or completely serious rejection of America and our diction. Did he not intentionally use the big Websters rather than the Oxford English dictionary when translating Eugene Onegin?
1
@Natasha Rukhin No. He thought that his own *spoken* English was second-rate.
2
"Stalin had just become an American ally. Nabokov’s contract was not renewed." The author insinuates that Wellesley College was falling in line with US foreign policy by declining to renew Nabokov's contract. Is there any evidence to support this?
19
It's a pleasure to read Schiff on Nabokov.
"Speak, Memory" moved me deeply.
His stories (Vintage has the collection in paperback) don't get the respect they deserve.
Nabokov was a great practitioner of literary fiction at a time when the latter was arguably the leading form of high art.
Alas, literary fiction's role has waned as other art forms, less tactile, more adaptable to changes in media, the transmission of digital information, and the economics of publishing, have eclipsed it in importance.
I continue to be enraptured by great novels printed on paper, residing between covers, a bookmark designating the period at a sentence's end where I'll commence a joyful encounter with a good writer.
21
@Taz I second your endorsement of the short stories. Each one is Faberge gem, glittering with jeweled sentences.
3
@Taz - do you mean, recommence?
1
@Paul Adams
Get me rewrite!
I humbly acknowledge your sharp blue pencil, Paul. Good catch.
1
Thanks for a wonderful piece on a fine author. I just happend to have recently listened to Jeremy Irons' wonderful reading of Lolita.
My grandparents fled Russia at the same time, and for similar reasons, as Nabokov, but instead of heading for Europe they settled in Shanghai. China was fine for awhile. Of course that all went south once Mao came in and once again they had to flee.
16
@James Gaston - Irons's reading of "Lolita" is stunning. his ability to capture the irony of the self pity and the assurance of delusion is masterful. i can't recommend it highly enough.
7
My father was Nabokov's student at Cornell when I was born and happened to run into him that day. He knew before my grandparents.
18
What a wonderful essay.
Stacy Schiff is a very gifted writer. If interested after reading this article I highly recommend you pick up her book "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)". It's a terrific read and a beautiful portrait of this couple.
46
Nabokov has been my favorite author for decades. I have read all his books, some more than once.
He was such a masterful author in English that it has always hard to believe that it was not his native language.
Though far less known than Lolita, let me make a recommendation for his "novel" Pale Fire. It is not an easy book because of its odd structure - a 999 line poem, followed by an alleged commentary on the poem that flashes back and forth between different worlds, real and imagined . But it is an absolute tour de force of literary invention and poetic imagination. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but definitely worth a look. If you like it, you will probably love it.
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@Robert
Gift and Приглашение на казнь.
When I immigrated to the States . forty years ago I had a passable English, Did not improve much.
When I needed to find a translation of the word, or sensation, or thought, from a much richer language , SORRY, I looked to Nabokov, whom I was forbidden to read before. He always helped.
14
@Robert if you enjoy him in English, he is 10 times better in Russian. Not too late to start studying it, pal.
3
@RobertYes!! Pale Fire! The best. Mary McCarthy thought so too.
9
While there is so much in this essay to spark thoughts, I find myself wondering on how much of history, personal and social, is so contingent. What incredible luck to the world of literature that he made it into a fruitful exile.
And to ponder prices paid, and value for cost. Had the Russian Revolution not happened, or failed, and had the Nabokovs not fled, who would the novelist be in that alternate universe? A dissolute aristo flitting among parties and resorts? A timeserver in the Duma or the Tsar's inner circle? A bureacrat pushing paper?
Inescapably, history's travails were the birthpangs of a great artist. Was the horror of the Revolution a price worth paying if without it we wouldn't have 'Pale Fire', 'Lolita,' Speak, Memory'? Was the Black Plague a price worth paying for the Renaissance?
To some extent the essay answers this in pointing out that Nabokov rightly disliked 'Dr Zhivago'; Pasternak's Nobel, as is often true of Nobels, was given for political reasons rather than for merit. (And Nabokov never won one.) I doubt any reasonable person would suggest the upside of the Russian Revolution was that it gave us the novel 'Dr Zhivago'.
(Aside: Nabokov did write an alternate-universe novel, 'Ada, or Ardor', but it was not among his better works.)
9
@ACW What shaped him was the exile; that much is obvious, he admits it many time over in his correspondence. Nabokov was, albeit a brilliant writer, a very mediocre human being, by all accounts; if not for the Revolution, he would be an average pretentious bourgeoisie. In a very perverted way, the Russia's collapse (still unfolding a century later) has blessed him with fame and fortune, albeit having taken everything of his.
15
@ACW Given the chance, Nabokov might have made the trade, since the revolution led to his father's murder.
Your point about the power of contingency in our lives is well taken and, as a longtime fan of alternate history science fiction, something I ponder frequently. In that capacity, I also strongly disagree with you about ADA, which I consider a marvel.
1
Nabokov’s memoir of his childhood, “Speak, Memory,” is a wonderful book.
43
Thank you Stacy Schiff for a fine enlightening article.
I've never heard the "champion figure skater switching to roller skates" metaphor or the "Upton Lewis" putdown of socially conscious writing, both representative turns of phrase honed for effect.
In his Cornell lectures, Nabokov reserved the most biting criticism he could think of for Russia's Soviet usurpers when he called their artistic tastes "bourgeois."
17
@Lou Argyres Actually, in his lectures, Nabokov quoted Soviets with Russians, which turned a lot of his fellow Russian emigrees away from him (not that he was particularly interested in that association anyway). Solzhenytsyn, for example, despised Nabokov deeply calling him a "Rabbid Russophobe Rex Splode".
2
An excellent article. I still find it amazing that Nabokov could write such incredible prose in a language that was not his native tongue, even if he was taught English at an early age. His writings are works of true genius.
24
Lovely piece of writing, Ms. Schiff. Thank you.
32
Such a complex man, such a survivor, and such a brilliant writer. I have read both Nabokov's Lolita and Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago. Each novel left me with questions and persistent thoughts, each in its own way profoundly truthful about the human condition, each almost traumatically real not only about nations and countries but also about those people who are part of the populace. Such individuals are still "we," which makes these stories universal and timeless.
There is no way around it but to say without a doubt that Nabokov in particular was a master of the written word. With each sentence in Lolita especially comes a portrait of humanity, colorful and eloquent. I often wonder how this author, this thinker, would view the rampant pedophilia which is here in his adopted country as well as many nations throughout the world. Did he see something about the perversion of human nature that we either denied or were ignorant of? Perhaps for our children and their children, we should study the above book, not with horror but with an open mind toward the dark sides of too many people's souls.
28
@Kathy Lollock. I don't quite get it: are you advocating rationalizing pedophilia?!
2
@Yulia Berkovitz Yikes! No! Sorry for that...
2
‘Lolita’ is a masterpiece, and still it makes me want to claw my eyes out.
Few writers in modernity have been as gifted at conveying raw emotion as Vladimir Nabokov.
30
This a superbly written piece about one of the great "American" novelists. This quality of writing is why I subscribe to The Times.
116
Remarkable piece -- I did not know Nabokov's origin story, nor his later hawkish McCarthyism. Funny that he calls his English "second-rate," when of course few people have ever wrangled the language as beautifully and innovatively as he did!
58
@Tara Nabokov was not the only person intimately familiar with Soviet tyranny who seemed blind to McCarthyism's vileness. Arthur Koestler shrugged off HUAC. American "fascism" seems tame to those who have witnessed fascism on a large scale.
1
Thank you.
15
Thanks for a wonderful piece of writing about a fascinating person. Having spent my childhood in the Soviet Union, I think I can understand why Nabokov could not stand Pasternak. While Pasternak was a free thinker, he was also Soviet writer. Nabokov could not accept anyone who accepted the Bolshevik rule.
62
@A. K. Moreover, in his later years (it is well-documented in his own letters; see the Geneva 2003 edition of his full writings, for example) he had grown into quite a Russophobe. Take this quote for once: "Russians have, or had, a special penchant for smug philistinism—poshlust. Russian poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an aesthetic judgment but also a moral indictment. The genuine, the guileless, the good is never poshlust. It is possible to maintain that a simple, uncivilized man is seldom if ever a poshlust since poshlism presupposes the veneer of the Russian civilization".
9