Vladimir Vladimirovich
Nabokov ( , ; c – 2 July 1977) was a multilingual Russian-American
novelist and
short story writer.Nabokov wrote
his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international
prominence as a master English prose stylist. He also made
contributions to
entomology and had an
interest in
chess problems.
Nabokov's
Lolita (1955) is
frequently cited as amongst his most important novels, and is his
most widely known, exhibiting the love of intricate
word play and descriptive detail that
characterized all his works. The novel was ranked at #4 in the list
of the
Modern Library 100
Best Novels by the
Modern
Library. His memoir entitled
Speak, Memory was listed #8 on the Modern
Library nonfiction list.
Life and career
Russia
Nabokov
was born on 22 April 1899 (10 April 1899 Old-Style) in Saint
Petersburg
.b
The eldest
of five children of liberal lawyer, politician and journalist
Vladimir Dmitrievich
Nabokov and his wife, née Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikova, he was
born to a wealthy and prominent family of the untitled nobility of
Saint
Petersburg. His
cousins included the composer
Nicolas
Nabokov. He spent his childhood and youth there and at the
country estate
Vyra near
Siverskaya, south of the city.
Nabokov's childhood, which he called "perfect", was remarkable in
several ways. The family spoke Russian, English and French in their
household, and Nabokov was trilingual from an early age. In fact,
much to his father's patriotic chagrin, Nabokov could read and
write English before he could Russian. In
Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls numerous
details of his privileged childhood, and his ability to recall in
vivid detail memories of his past was a boon to him during his
permanent exile, as well as providing a theme which echoes from his
first book,
Mary, all the way
to later works such as
Ada or Ardor: A Family
Chronicle. While the family was nominally
Orthodox, they felt no religious
fervor and little Vladimir was not forced to attend church after he
lost interest. In 1916 Nabokov inherited the estate Rozhdestveno,
next to Vyra, from his uncle Vasiliy Ivanovich Rukavishnikov
("Uncle Ruka" in
Speak, Memory), but lost it in the
revolution one year later; this was the only house he would ever
own.
Emigration
After the
1917 February Revolution,
Vladimir Dmitrievich
Nabokov became a secretary of the Russian Provisional
Government and the family was forced to flee the city after the
Bolshevik Revolution for
Crimea
, not expecting to be away for very long.
They lived
at a friend's estate and in September 1918, they moved to Livadiya
; Nabokov's
father was a minister of justice of the Crimean provisional
government. After the withdrawal of the German Army
(November 1918) and the defeat of the
White
Army in early 1919, the Nabokovs left for exile in western
Europe.
On
2 April 1919, the family left Sevastopol
on the last ship. They settled briefly
in England, where Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College,
Cambridge
and studied Slavic
and Romance languages. He
later drew on his Cambridge experiences to write the novel
Glory. In 1920, his family
moved to Berlin, where his father set up the émigré newspaper
Rul' (Rudder). Nabokov would follow to Berlin after his
studies at Cambridge two years later.
In March 1922, Nabokov's father was assassinated in Berlin by
Russian monarchists as he was fighting to protect their real
target,
Pavel Milyukov, a leader of
the
Constitutional
Democratic Party-in-exile. This mistaken, violent death would
echo again and again in Nabokov's fiction, where characters would
meet their deaths under mistaken terms. In
Pale Fire, for example, one interpretation of
the novel has a communist assassin murder the poet John Shade while
attempting to kill a displaced monarch who has escaped from his
home country.
Shortly after his father's death, his mother
and sister moved to Prague
.
Nabokov stayed in Berlin where he had become a recognized poet and
writer within the émigré community and published under the pen name
V. Sirin - perhaps signifying an owl or a
mythological bird. To supplement his scant
writing income, he taught languages and gave
tennis and boxing lessons.
In 1922 Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert; the engagement
was broken off by her family in early 1923 because he had no steady
job. In May 1923, he met
Véra
Evseyevna Slonim at a charity ball in Berlin and married her in
April 1925. Their only child,
Dmitri,
was born in 1934.
In 1936, Vera lost her job due to the increasingly antisemitic
environment and the assassin of his father was appointed
second-in-command of the Russian émigré group. In the same year
Nabokov began seeking a job in the English-speaking world. In 1937
he left Germany for France, where he had a short affair with
Russian émigré Irina Guadanini; his family followed, making their
last visit to Prague en route.
They settled in Paris, but also spent time in
Cannes
, Menton
, Cap d'Antibes, and Frejus. In May 1940 the Nabokov family fled
from the advancing German troops to the United States on board the
Champlain.
America
The
Nabokovs settled down in Manhattan and Vladimir started a job at
the American Museum of Natural
History
. In October he met
Edmund Wilson, who became his close friend
until their falling out two decades later and introduced Nabokov's
work to American editors.
Nabokov
came to Wellesley
College
in 1941 as resident lecturer in comparative
literature. The position, created specifically for him,
provided an income and free time to write creatively and pursue his
lepidoptery. Nabokov is remembered as
the founder of Wellesley's Russian Department. His lecture series
on major nineteenth-century Russian writers was hailed as "funny",
"learned", and "brilliantly satirical."
The Nabokovs resided
in Wellesley,
Massachusetts
during the 1941-42 academic year; they moved to
Cambridge,
Massachusetts
in September 1942 and lived there until June
1948. Following a lecture tour through the United States,
Nabokov returned to Wellesley for the 1944–45 academic year as a
lecturer in Russian. In 1945, he became a
naturalized citizen of the United
States. He served through the 1947-48 term as Wellesley's one-man
Russian Department, offering courses in Russian language and
literature. His classes were popular, due as much to his unique
teaching style as to the wartime interest in all things Russian.
At the
same time he was curator of lepidoptery at Harvard
University
's Museum of Comparative Zoology
. After being encouraged by Morris Bishop, Nabokov left Wellesley in 1948
to teach Russian and European literature at Cornell
University
.
Nabokov wrote
Lolita while traveling
on butterfly-collection trips in the
western United States which he
undertook every summer. (Nabokov never learned to drive. Vera acted
as chauffeur; when Nabokov attempted to burn unfinished drafts of
Lolita, it was Vera who stopped him.
He called her the
best-humored woman he had ever known.) In June 1953 he and his
family came to Ashland,
Oregon
, renting a house on Meade Street from Professor
Taylor, head of the Southern Oregon College
Department of Social Science. There he
finished
Lolita and began writing
the novel
Pnin. He roamed the nearby
mountains looking for butterflies, and wrote a poem called
Lines Written in Oregon.
On 1 October 1953, he and his family left
for Ithaca, New
York
.
Montreux
The grave of Nabokov at Cimetière de
Clarens (Switzerland)
After the great financial success of
Lolita, Nabokov was able to return to Europe and
devote himself exclusively to writing.
Also his son had
obtained a position as an operatic bass at Reggio Emilia
. On 1 October 1961, he and Véra moved to the
Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux
, Switzerland; he stayed there until the end of his
life. From his sixth-floor quarters he conducted his
business and took tours to the Alps, Corsica, and Sicily to hunt
butterflies. In 1976 he was hospitalized with an undiagnosed fever.
He was rehospitalized in Lausanne in 1977 suffering from severe
bronchial congestion.
He died on 2 July in Montreux surrounded by his family and, according to his son,
Dmitri, "with a triple moan of descending pitch".
His
remains were cremated and are buried at the Clarens cemetery in
Montreux.
At the time of his death, he was working on a novel titled
The Original of
Laura. His wife Vera and son Dmitri were entrusted with
Nabokov's
literary executorship,
and though he asked them to burn the manuscript, they chose not to
destroy his final work. The incomplete manuscript, around 125
handwritten index cards, remained in a Swiss bank vault where only
two people, Dmitri Nabokov and an unknown person, had access.
Portions of the manuscript were shown to Nabokov scholars. In
April, 2008, Dmitri announced that he would publish the novel.
The Original of Laura was published on November 17,
2009.
Prior to the incomplete novel's publication, several short excerpts
of
The Original of Laura were made public, most recently
by German weekly
Die Zeit, which
in its 14 August 2008 issue for the first time reproduced some of
Nabokov's original index cards obtained by its reporter Malte
Herwig. In the accompanying article, Herwig concludes that "Laura",
although fragmentary, is "vintage Nabokov".
In July 2009,
Playboy magazine
acquired the rights to print a 5,000 word excerpt from "
The
Original of Laura." It will be printed in their December
issue.
Work
Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to his
greatest distinction in the English language. For this achievement,
he has been compared with
Joseph
Conrad; yet Nabokov viewed this as a dubious comparison, as
Conrad composed in French and English. Nabokov disdained the
comparison for
aesthetic reasons,
lamenting to the critic Edmund Wilson, "I am too old to change
Conradically" — which John Updike later called, "itself a jest of
genius." Nabokov translated many of his own early works into
English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri. His
trilingual upbringing had a profound influence on his artistry. He
has metaphorically described the transition from one language to
another as the slow journey at night from one village to the next
with only a candle for illumination. Nabokov himself translated
into Russian two books that he had originally written in English,
Conclusive Evidence, and
Lolita. The first
"translation" was made because of Nabokov's feeling of imperfection
in the English version. Writing the book, he noted that he needed
to translate his own memories into English, and to spend a lot of
time explaining things which are well-known in Russia; then he
decided to re-write the book once again, in his first native
language, and after that he made the final version,
Speak,
Memory (Nabokov first wanted to name it "Speak,
Mnemosyne"). Nabokov was a proponent of
individualism, and rejected concepts and
ideologies that curtailed individual freedom and expression, such
as
totalitarianism in its various
forms as well as
Freud's
psychoanalysis.
Poshlost, or as he transcribed it,
poshlust, is disdained and frequently mocked in his
works.
Nabokov published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" in the 1920s
to 1940s, occasionally to mask his identity from critics. He also
makes cameo appearances in some of his novels, such as the
character "Vivian Darkbloom" (an
anagram of
"Vladimir Nabokov") in
Lolita.
Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use
of
alliteration. He gained both fame
and notoriety with his novel
Lolita (1955), which tells of
a grown man's devouring passion for a twelve-year-old girl. This
and his other novels, particularly
Pale Fire (1962), won
him a place among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. His
longest novel, which met with a mixed response, is
Ada (1969). He devoted
more time to the composition of this novel than any of his others.
Nabokov's fiction is characterized by its linguistic playfulness.
For example, his short story "
The Vane
Sisters" is famous in part for its
acrostic final paragraph, in which the first
letters of each word spell out a message from beyond the
grave.
Nabokov's stature as a literary critic is founded largely on his
four-volume
translation of and
commentary on
Aleksandr Pushkin's
epic of the Russian soul,
Eugene
Onegin, published in 1964. That commentary ended with an
appendix titled
Notes on
Prosody which has developed a reputation of its own. It
stemmed from his observation that while Pushkin's
iambic tetrameters had been a
part of
Russian literature for a
fairly short two centuries, they were clearly understood by the
Russian prosodists. On the other hand, he viewed the much older
English
iambic tetrameters as
muddled and poorly documented. In his own words:
- I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my
own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in
certain rather copious details of classification before even
tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of
Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very
little—in comparison to the forced preliminaries — namely, to a few
things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know
in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene
Onegin in particular.
He argued that all verse translations of Onegin fatally betrayed the author's use of language; critics replied that failure to make the translation as beautifully styled as the original was a much greater betrayal.
He firmly believed that novels should not aim to teach and that readers should not merely empathise with characters but that a 'higher' aesthetic enjoyment should be attained, partly by paying great attention to details of style and structure. He detested what he saw as 'general ideas' in novels, and so when teaching Ulysses, for example, he would insist students keep an eye on where the characters were in Dublin (with the aid of a map) rather than teaching the complex Irish history that many critics see as being essential to an understanding of the novel.
During his ten years at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates
to the delights of great fiction, including the
Bleak House of
Charles Dickens in fifty-minute classroom
lectures .
In his essay "Nabokov, or Nostalgia", Danilo Kiš wrote that Nabokov's is "a magnificent, complex, and sterile art." Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko said in a Playboy interview that he could hear the clatter of surgical tools in Nabokov's prose.
Not until
glasnost did Nabokov's work
become officially available in his native country.
Gorbachev authorized a five-volume edition of his
writing in 1988.
Nabokov's synesthesia
Nabokov was a
synesthete and described
aspects of synesthesia in several of his works. In his memoir
Speak, Memory, he notes that his wife also exhibited
synesthesia; like her husband, her mind's eye associated colors
with particular letters. They discovered that Dmitri shared the
trait, and moreover that the colors he associated with some letters
were in some cases blends of his parents' hues—"which is as if
genes were painting in
aquarelle".
Vladimir Nabokov's case of
synesthesia
can be described in more detail than merely the association of
colors with particular letters. For some synesthetes, letters are
not simply associated with certain colors; they
are
colored. Nabokov frequently endowed his protagonists with a similar
gift. In
Bend
Sinister Krug comments on his perception of the word
"loyalty" as being like a golden fork lying out in the sun. In
The Defense, Nabokov mentioned briefly how the main
character's father, a writer, found he was unable to complete a
novel that he planned to write, becoming lost in the fabricated
storyline by "starting with colors." Many other subtle references
are made in Nabokov's writing that can be traced back to his
synesthesia. Many of his characters have a distinct "sensory
appetite" reminiscent of synesthesia.
Entomology
His career as an
entomologist was
equally distinguished. Throughout an extensive career of collecting
he never learned to drive a car, and he depended on his wife Véra
to take him to collecting sites.
During the 1940s, as a research fellow in
zoology, he was responsible for organizing
the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard
University. His writings in this area were highly
technical. This, combined with his specialty in the relatively
unspectacular tribe
Polyommatini of the
family
Lycaenidae, has left this facet of
his life little explored by most admirers of his literary works. He
identified the
Karner Blue. The
genus Nabokovia was
named after him in honor of this work, as were a number of
butterfly and moth
species (e.g. many of the
genera
Madeleinea and
Pseudolucia).
paleontologist and essayist
Stephen
Jay Gould discussed Nabokov's lepidoptery in an essay reprinted
in his book
I Have Landed. Gould notes that Nabokov was
occasionally a scientific "stick-in-the-mud"; for example, Nabokov
never accepted that
genetics or the
counting of
chromosomes could be a valid
way to distinguish species of insects, and relied on the
traditional (for lepidopterists) microscopic comparison of their
genitalia.
The Harvard
Museum of Natural History
, which now contains the Museum of Comparative
Zoology, still possesses Nabokov's "genitalia cabinet", where the
author stored his collection of male blue butterfly
genitalia. [5807],
[5808] "Nabokov was a serious taxonomist", according
to the museum staff writer
Nancy Pick,
author of
The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures
at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, ISBN 0-06-053718-3.
"He actually did quite a good job at distinguishing species that
you would not think were different—by looking at their genitalia
under a microscope six hours a day, seven days a week, until his
eyesight was permanently impaired."
[5809]
Many of Nabokov's fans have tried to ascribe literary value to his
scientific papers, Gould notes. Conversely, others have claimed
that his scientific work enriched his literary output. Gould
advocates a third view, holding that the other two positions are
examples of the
post hoc ergo
propter hoc logical fallacy.
Rather than assuming that either side of Nabokov's work caused or
stimulated the other, Gould proposes that
both stemmed
from Nabokov's love of detail, contemplation and symmetry.
Chess problems
Nabokov spent considerable time during his exile on the composition
of
chess problems. Such compositions
he published in the Russian émigré press,
Poems and Problems (18 chess
compositions) and
Speak,
Memory (one problem). He describes the process of
composing and constructing in his memoir: "The strain on the mind
is formidable; the element of time drops out of one's
consciousness..." To him, the "originality, invention, conciseness,
harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity" of creating a chess
problem was similar to that in any other art.
Influence
The critic
James Wood argued
that Nabokov's use of descriptive detail proved an "overpowering,
and not always very fruitful, influence on two or three generations
after him", including authors such as
Martin
Amis and
John Updike. While a
student at Cornell in the 1950s,
Thomas
Pynchon attended several of Nabokov's lectures and went on to
make a direct allusion to
Lolita in
chapter six of his novel
The
Crying of Lot 49 (1966) in which Serge, counter-tenor in
the band
The Paranoids, sings:
- What chance has a lonely surfer boy
- For the love of a surfer chick,
- With all these Humbert Humbert cats
- Coming on so big and sick?
- For me, my baby was a woman,
- For him she's just another nymphet.
It has also been argued that Pynchon's prose style is influenced by
Nabokov's preference for
actualism over
realism. Of the authors who came to prominence during Nabokov's
lifetime,
John Banville,
Don DeLillo,
Salman
Rushdie, and
Edmund White were all
influenced by Nabokov.
Several authors who came to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s have
also cited Nabokov's work as a literary influence.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
Michael Chabon listed
Lolita and
Pale Fire among the "books that, I thought, changed my
life when I read them," and stated that "Nabokov's English combines
aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to
render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an
ounce of schmaltz or soggy language". Pulitzer Prize winner
Jeffrey Eugenides said that
"Nabokov has always been and remains one of my favorite writers.
He's able to juggle ten balls where most people can juggle three or
four."
T. Coraghessan Boyle said that "Nabokov's
playfulness and the ravishing beauty of his prose are ongoing
influences" on his writing, and
Jhumpa
Lahiri,
Marisha Pessl,
Zadie Smith,
Ki
Longfellow , and
Maxim D.
Shrayer have also acknowledged
Nabokov's influence.
List of works
Works about Nabokov
Biography
- Boyd,
Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The
Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1990. ISBN
0-691-06794-5 (hardback) 1997. ISBN
0-691-02470-7 (paperback). London:
Chatto & Windus, 1990. ISBN
0-7011-3700-2 (hardback)
- Boyd, Brian, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. ISBN
0-691-06797-X (hardback) 1993. 0-691-02471-5 (paperback). London:
Chatto & Windus, 1992. ISBN 0-7011-3701-0 (hardback)
- Ch'ien, Evelyn. See chapter, "A Shuttlecock Over the Atlantic"
in "Weird English." Harvard University Press, 2004.
- Field, Andrew. VN The Life and Art of Vladimir
Nabokov. New York: Crown Publishers. 1986. ISBN
0-517-56113-1
- Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Vladimir Nabokov.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1987.
978-0872494954.
- Proffer, Elendea, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A pictorial
biography. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1991. ISBN 0-87501-078-4
(a collection of photographs)
- Rivers, J.E., and Nicol, Charles. Nabokov's Fifth Arc.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982. ISBN
978-0292755222.
- Schiff, Stacy. Véra (Mrs.
Vladimir Nabokov). New York, NY.: Random House, 1999. ISBN
0-679-44790-3.
Criticism
- Nicol, Charles and Barabtarlo, Gennady. A small alpine
form: studies in Nabokov's short fiction. London, Garland,
1993. ISBN 9780815308577.
- Shrayer, Maxim D. The World of Nabokov's Stories. Austin and
London: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Bibliography
- Alexandrov, Vladimir E., ed. The Garland Companion to
Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. ISBN
0-8153-0354-8.
- Funke, Sarah. Vera's Butterflies: First Editions by
Vladimir Nabokov Inscribed to his Wife. New York: Glenn
Horowitz Bookseller, 1999. ISBN 0-9654202-1-0.
- Juliar, Michael. Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive
Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1986. ISBN
0-8240-8590-6.
Books written by Vladimir Nabokov:
"Mary""The Defense""Glory""Laugher in the Dark""Lolita""The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight"
Fictional works
Peter Medak's short television film,
Nabokov on Kafka, is a
dramatization of Nabokov's lectures on
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. The part of
Nabokov is played by
Christopher
Plummer.Nabokov makes three cameo appearances, at widely
scattered points in his life, in
W.
G. Sebald's
The
Emigrants.
Entomology
- Johnson, Kurt, and Steve Coates. Nabokov's blues: The
scientific odyssey of a literary genius. New York:
McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-137330-6 (very accessibly written)
- Sartori, Michel, ed. Les Papillons de Nabokov. [The
butterflies of Nabokov.] Lausanne: Musée cantonal de Zoologie,
1993. ISBN 2-9700051-0-7 (exhibition catalogue, primarily in
English)
- Zimmer, Dieter. A guide to Nabokov's butterflies and
moths. Privately published, 2001. ISBN 3-00-007609-3 (
web
page)
See also
Footnotes
Confusion over his birth date was generated by Russia switching
from the Old Style Julian to the New Style Gregorian calendar at
the beginning of the 20th century. Since 1900 was a
leap year in
Julian
but not
Gregorian calendar, the
offset increased from 12 to 13 days so while Nabokov was born 10
April 1899 in Russia (22 April in the West), his first birthday
fell on 23 April 1900 in the West (still 10 April in Russia). In
1917, his "Russian" 17th birthday would still have fallen on 10
April (Julian) (23 April Gregorian in the West), but after the
October revolution his 18th birthday would fall on 23 April
Gregorian because Russia had then changed its calendar. While the
22 April date is perhaps technically more correct, in his memoirs
Speak, Memory Nabokov
indicates he preferred to celebrate his birthday "with diminishing
pomp" on 23 April (p. 6). As he happily pointed out on several
occasions during interviews this meant he also shared a birthday
with William Shakespeare and Shirley Temple (see, for example, his
New York Times interview with Alden Whitman on 23 April
1969, p. 20; see also Brian Boyd's biography)
Notes
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