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Vladimir Nabokov speaks from the beyond the grave ...
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"Lolita" author Vladimir Nabokov speaks from the beyond the grave
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Photo: Vladimir Nabokov
Sunday, January 22, 2012 - Life Lines: Where Readers Write by Michael Johnson
BORDEAUX, France, January 22, 2012 — Millions of Americans have read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — usually for the wrong reasons — while ignoring the voluminous trove of literature the Russian-born master left us. He has been called the premier stylist of the English language, but his prose can also be demanding. Many readers turn away.
Brian Boyd, a New Zealand academic and Nabokov’s main biographer, has studied Nabokov’s works, edited some of them posthumously, and placed the entire oeuvre in context as a “natural bridge” between English-language and Russian-language literature.
Nabokov demanding? Yes, says Boyd, but he is also the funniest writer ever.
Boyd’s determination to bring Nabokov to a wider public began with a 1991 two-volume biography that cleared up many of the enigmas, such as where he came from and how he got here. Nabokov died in 1977 at the age of 78 in a hospital in Switzerland, victim of a hospital bug that has never been fully explained.
Boyd never met him but has been such an enthusiast and authority that he keeps getting pulled back into the thriving Nabokov industry among academics and the literati.
Stalking Nabokov
In this new book, Stalking Nabokov (Columbia University Press), he offers a selection of his own writings about the remote, arrogant Nabokov, many of them amusing, others academic, all of them fascinating. “I have tried many times to stop writing about him,” Boyd says, “but…he keeps on setting me new assignments, making me offers I cannot refuse.” So Nabokov does speak from beyond the grave.
British novelist Martin Amis wrote recently in the London Times Literary Supplement that this book is “a tribute not just to the extraordinary literary animal, but also to the size, force and stamina of an extraordinary brain.”
Nabokov statue in Montreux, Switzerland
Boyd’s essays range from the light and fluffy to a heavy critical analysis of Nabokov’s best-known novels, Ada, Pale Fire, Lolita, his memoir Speak Memory, and his work-in-progress at the time of his death, The Original of Laura.
In a chapter on Nabokov’s humor, Boyd concludes that Nabokov is funny because “he wants to amuse us, just as he is stylish because he wants to excite our imaginations and to make us realize what the imagination can do.” He mingles laughter with its opposites, “”humor and horror, laughter and loss”. Nabokov applied as many kinds of humor as possible, some fast, some slow-release, some local, some verbal…some barbed,” Boyd writes. Martin Amis agrees, and defines the secret of Nabokov’s prose as its “divine levity.”
Nabokov could be just as witty in person. When an American professor told him of a nun in his class who complained that a couple in the back row would not stop “spooning,” Nabokov said he should have told the nun, “You’re lucky they weren’t forking.”
In his research, Boyd has unearthed a wealth of such anecdotes as well as letters, unfinished manuscripts and a range of personal reminiscences from surviving family members and people who knew Nabokov, or knew someone who knew him, or someone who stood next to him in the men’s room, “I kid you not,” says Boyd. He went public with this selection of papers and speeches when he realized what he had. “I decided others might like to see this stuff,” he explains.
Battle of the Literati
A recurring theme in Boyd’s short works is Nabokov’s dedication to the study of Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin and its difficulties in penetrating the English-language barrier – due primarily to awkward translations of Pushkin’s melodic Russian.
As he researched his four-volume masterwork on Onegin, Nabokov realized, says Boyd, that he could make Pushkin part of world literature, and he incorporated Pushkin in his fiction. Most Americans had never heard of Onegin until the 1960s when Nabokov first published a tirade against a translation by Walter Arndt, then a professor of Russian at Dartmouth College. Nabokov’s demolition of Arndt’s work was all the more ill-tempered for the fact that it beat Nabokov’s Onegin into print by a few months, stealing the exclusivity he had planned to enjoy.
The Onegin discussion morphed into a feud between Nabokov and critic Edmund Wilson and developed into one of the great literary clashes of modern intellectual history. It brought to an abrupt end nearly 30 years of close friendship between the erudite writers.
First, Nabokov scolded Arndt for “throwing in his own tropes” while resorting to “vulgarisms and stale slang” and “crippled clichés and mongrel idioms.” He listed several “howlers,” which he defined as “the product of ignorance and self-assurance.” Arndt responded, noting Nabokov’s “mixture of arrogance, cuteness and occasional distortion.” He noticed the “fine sparkle of pure venom” in the attack.
Wilson then weighed in, defending Arndt and pointing out that Nabokov had a habit of rejecting the work of others. In sarcastic tones rare for him, Wilson wrote that readers must accept that Nabokov is “unique and incomparable and that everybody else who attempted (Onegin) is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality.”
The last salvo came from Nabokov, who replied to Wilson and other critics in an 8,000-word screed published in Encounter in 1966. Knowing how to reach Wilson’s considerable ego, he recalled the days when the tone-deaf Wilson appealed for help in some of the basics of the Russian language.
Nabokov mocks Wilson’s “monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation” and ridicules his overconfident attempt to read a few stanzas of Onegin in the original and dismisses the renowned critic Wilson for a “ludicrous display of pseudo-scholarship.” The Onegin saga proves once again the well-known quip that academic clashes can be so bitter because the stakes are so small.
Stalking is the latest book about Nabokov, the man and his work, but editors and publishers are planning on many more titles. Three volumes of poetry translations, two more volumes of notes on Onegin, and two (possibly three) volumes of his Russian literature lectures at Cornell University are in preparation.
The Nabokov industry, grave or no grave, shows no sign of flagging.
Michael Johnson is an American journalist and writer based in Bordeaux, France. He also writes for the International Herald Tribune and American Spectator.
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