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Naturalization Papers,Wall Street Journal
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The Naturalization Papers - WSJ
Wall Street Journal
Vladimir who? If today the name Nabokov is almost household, often mentioned
in the same breath as Joyce, Proust and Kafka, until the late 1950s—by which
point its bearer, born in 1899, was himself in his late 50s—it was nothing
of the sort. His early writings enjoyed a following among Russian émigrés,
and his more recent ones had their admirers in the English-speaking world,
but to the general public he was virtually unknown. Then, in 1958, came the
U.S. publication of “Lolita,” which sold 100,000 copies in its first three
weeks (it was the first book since “Gone With the Wind” to do so), went on
to sell millions of copies world-wide, and put an enormous booster—a
souped-up V-8 engine, as it were—under the reputation of its author,
guaranteeing a large audience not only for his future books but for his
previous ones. None of this is extraordinary in itself: Many writers have
struggled for decades before hitting pay dirt and vaulting into the
pantheon. But NabokovÂ’s trajectory was special. That a pampered,
butterfly-mad child prodigy from one of czarist St. PetersburgÂ’s richest
families should win fame for his vast body of experimental, sometimes
difficult work by means of a novel in the guise of the jailhouse confession
of a Swiss-English pederast obsessed with a gum-chewing American 12-year-old
. . . well, it could hardly have been foreseen.[ ]
Nabokov was nothing if not unique, but his uniqueness can be oppressive.
Whatever he has in common with the great modernists, he also bears some
resemblance to wildly mannered, orchidaceous writers like Ronald Firbank.
Reading him, one finds oneself in the hands of a master yet also in those of
a Dr. Moreau, grotesquely intent on bending all life to his whim. Even his
most seductive novels, “Lolita” and the laid-back “Pnin,” are marred by this
showiness and self-indulgence, not to mention his heckling of Freud and
other bêtes noires. Catnip to some, his penchant for doppelgängers and
elaborate patterns is tiresome to others. Thankfully, thereÂ’s also his
irrepressible humor and inimitable phrasing. Not just in his fiction but in
“Speak, Memory” (which goes light on his vices and heavy on his virtues),
his works of cockeyed scholarship, his celebrated Cornell lectures, and his
letters to Edmund Wilson (collected in the addictive “Dear Bunny, Dear
Volodya”), Nabokov is often hilarious and consistently strikes sparks from
words that no one else could or would. (At random, I think of HumbertÂ’s
characterization of the lusty Charlotte Haze, going for him in bed, as
“fresh and strong as an octopus,” and of two boys with the hots for Lolita
as “gangling, golden-haired high school uglies, all muscles and gonorrhea.”)
And the fact that his exuberant individuality defines itself against
communism and Nazism—both experienced firsthand—lends it force and dignity.
Few Americans have embodied intellectual freedom with half his brio.
Several years ago, the New York Times published an article under the
headline “Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated.” It seems
that lepidopterists had long dismissed his notion that the Polyommatus blues
emigrated from Asia to the New World via the Bering Strait, but recent
evidence has proved him correct. Hard not to think of the man himself,
fluttering between countries and continents, defying all logic and
convention, settling nowhere, native only to the paradisal Kingdom of Zembla
between his ears.
— http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-naturalization-papers-1437768325
Mr. Downing is the author of “Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet
Ross.”
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