I first saw the name of Vladimir Nabokov on the front cover of his novel Lolita way back in 1966. It was the age of discovery. Its first sentence is engraved in my memory. The name of the author had for quite some time been associated exclusively with this novel in my mind until I came to discover that he has bequeathed to posterity other works which deserve equal or more attention. The life and the career of the writer, too, makes interesting reading.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in the then Imperial Russia at St. Petersburg on April 23 1899. He was the eldest son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a prominent liberal politician and an Anglophile aristocrat. His mother, Elena, came from a family of well-known industrialists. From his father, Vladimir inherited a love of nature, especially butterflies, and chess. From his mother he acquired a passion for the visual arts, particularly painting, and for the marvels of memory.
Vladimir Nabokov published his first volume of poetry in 1916. It was soon followed with a second one. The family’s comfortable existence came to an end when it was forced into exile in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Though his family was deprived of wealth and comfort, the culture he had acquired during his early years sustained Nabokov for the remaining sixty years of his life.
The Emigré Russian Press
The family settled in Berlin. Vladimir was sent to England where he joined the University of Cambridge. He spent the years from 1919 to 1923 there before returning to Berlin where he was to live till 1938.
Nabokov’s father, who worked as a newspaper publisher, was assassinated by right-wing Russian monarchists in 1922. He adopted the pen name V. Sirin and published two more volumes of poetry while contributing poems, chess problems, the first Russian crossword puzzles and reviews to the émigré Russian press. He also met his expenses by giving language and tennis lessons, working as a film extra, writing cabaret skits and plays and translating.
A few short stories preceded the first novel, Mashenka (1926; Mary, 1970), written soon after his marriage to Vera Slonim. Between 1925 and 1940 Nabokov established himself as a leading new writer of the Russian emigration with a string of nine novels, many stories and poems. Following Mary were Korol’, dama, Valet (1928; King, Queen, Knave, 1968), Zashchita Luzhina (serial 1929; book 1930; The Defence, 1964), Soglyadatay (1930; The Eye, 1965), Podvig (1932, Glory, 1971), Kamera Obskura (1932; Camera Obscura, 1936, revised as Laughter in the Dark, 1938) and Otchayanie (serial,1934; book, 1936; Despair, 1937, revised 1966). The best of the Russian novels were his last two: Priglashenie na Kazn’ (serial, 1955-6; book,1938; Invitation to a Beheading, 1959) and Dar (serial 1937-38; book, 1952; The Gift, 1963).
With the rise of Adolf Hitler, life in Nazi Germany was becoming increasingly difficult. In 1939 the Nabokovs with their four-year-old son Dmitri, moved to France. He had the feeling that his old European life was ending and undertook his first original English language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). The Nabokovs were to spend only two years in France before fleeing once again as the German forces were invading the country. 
The American Years
They arrived in New York in May, 1940. His hard-won fame as a Russian writer was unknown in America. He started anew in 1941 as an American writer. First, however, he had to provide for his wife and son. During the early years he taught at Wellesley College and worked as a lepidopterist at the Harvard Museum of comparative Zoology. He became an American citizen in 1945. His responsibilities left him little time for writing, but by 1947 he had completed his first “American” novel, Bend Sinister, a dark modernist fantasy about a philosopher who vainly tries to stand aside from political tyranny.
More important for his American reputation was the series of autobiographical vignettes that appeared in The New Yorker in the late forties and early fifties. After several revisions, they were collected in what was eventually to become Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1966), a revision of Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir (1951) and Drugie Berega (1954). Speak, Memory is an intensely artistic exploration of the writer’s first forty years.
In 1948, Vladimir Nabokov accepted a position as Professor of European literature at Cornell University, where he would spend the next decade. He taught in the winters, went on butterfly collecting expeditions throughout the American West each summer and continued writing. He also devoted considerable time to the translation of Russian classics into English.
The novella Pnin (1957) was written during the Cornell years as was Nabokov’s most famous work, Lolita (1955), the story of a young American girl and her perverted stepfather, Humbert Humbert. Only gradually did it emerge from the ensuing scandal that he had written an American masterpiece. The best-seller was later adapted for the screen and drew large audiences to the cinema halls.
Among the Great Masters
Nabokov returned to Europe for what was intended to be a visit. However, as time went by, he decided to stay permanently in Switzerland. In Montreux he wrote books that were to assure his place among the great masters of twentieth century world literature. Pale Fire (1962) takes the form of a commentary on a long poem. Ada: Or, Ardour. A Family Chronicle (1969) is a rich fantasy of brother-sister incest which enabled him to get a cover story in Time magazine. It was followed by the ghost story Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).
As Nabokov’s fame as an English writer grew, interest reawakened in what he had written in Russian which began to appear in English and many other languages.
An Important Link
Lolita is more than a stepfather’s obsession for the young daughter of his landlady. The pursuit of the child-woman in the words of Malcom Bradbury is “also a pursuit of the elusive symbol that is art itself… The book is a literary gallery of acrostics, puns and allusions to works of American literature. Dolores Haze is … also a metaphorical substitute for the ambiguous and elusive myth of America itself”.
Malcom Bradbury is also of the opinion that “Pale Fire is, inter alia, a brilliant literary parody, while Ada is both a reconstruction and deconstruction of an American story”. Nabokov represents an important link between the earlier European stages of the modern movement and development of that kind of writing in the United States that came to be called “postmodern”. He is one of the great tragic ironists of modern fiction. His exploration of the “parodic status of fiction in relation not only to other forms of literature but to reality itself, led to experiments with the potential of the novel. They could also be seen as commentaries on a time of disordered history, threatening plots and systems, and anxieties about the very nature of language and signs themselves”.
Nabokov comes clearly out of the Russian tradition. His work owes much to the tradition of Russian comic grotesquerie, particularly to Gogol, to the imagination of Pushkin, on whom he wrote, and, above all, to the climate of Russian symbolism in the pre-Revolutionary years, “which was preoccupied with the elusive relation of word to world”. His books collectively amount to a major investigation in the nature of fiction, fictionality, symbolic representation and into the nature of the modern artist. His characters function in a world characterised by chaotic disorder and historical displacement which extends to the émigré world of the United States.
A Household Word
It can be said of Vladimir Nabokov that he was a difficult modernist writer who catered for elite readers. This category of writers is admired especially by literary specialists. The most amazing aspect of Nabokov’s career is that he became a best-selling author and his name a household word thanks, in a large measure, to the scandal which followed the publication of Lolita.
His continued popularity, however, arose from literary qualities rare in a writer’s writer. Nabokov’s novels have strong, interesting plots and are marked by an elegant, if often, Rabelaisian sense of humour which renders them enjoyable. Due to his multicultural heritage Nabokov revitalized the novel, creating “master works” for a new international audience.
His writings were banned in Russia during his lifetime. With the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union and his policy of glasnost in the mid-1980’s, Nabokov’s works were republished in the land of his birth.
He died on July 2,1977 in Montreux, Switzerland.
Bibliography
- Johnson, D. Barton. Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor, Mich: Ardis, 1985.
- Bradbury, Malcom. The Modern American Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Massie, Allan. The Novel Today. Essex, England: Longman Group, 1990.
- Lee, L.L. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1976.
