Alter quotes Nabokov's words which deal with Krug, his philosophical character, when he reflects over Pascal's terrors ("Those mirrors of infinite space qui m'effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebounding with a hep and a hop") and adds "...and on the metaphor goes, for another dozen lines, showing thought the acrobat pirouetting in the "urine-soaked dust" of a circus ring as it completes its breathtaking stunt." For Alter, the narrator "enters into the protagonist's point of view. The mental leap from the anonymous girl's spangled wrap to the swooning galaxies is certainly Krug's, but it is unclear whether the elaborate metaphor of thought as a tightrope walker over the abyss of infinity is supposed to occur to Krug or is, more probably, the narrator's own poetic observation on how the mind works. The key to the passage and to the novel...is the sudden, extravagant efflorescence of the unanticipated. One hardly expects starry constellations and highwire acts on the darkened landing of a European apartment building in a city gripped by state terror." According to him "Nabokov's devotion to the exhilarating freedom of consciousness that allows it to scale heights, skirt abysses, peer into peculiar nooks and crannies is evident ...throughout his writing. The Defense, The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory are as much acts of resistance against the oppressive force of modern ideologies as are his two explicitly political novels."

For Robert Alter, the "growing interest in Nabokov within the Soviet Union as communism crumbles throws a retrospective light on the political dimension of this writer who for the most part eschewed politics while adhering to his father's staunch liberal outlook." A forbidden author in the Soviet Union until 1987, Nabokov's "identity as an émigré, an aristocrat, and a frank anti-Communist sufficed to make him taboo in the 1920s and 1930s" while the international success of Lolita had "confirmed him in the prudish eyes of the Soviet regime as a scandalously indecent writer." Only by the end of the second semester of 1990 "the journal Inostrannia Literatura (Foreign Literature) — an organization with official standing...[which] keeps a healthy distance from the Party-linked Writers' Union — sponsored a three-day conference on Nabokov, open to the public and covered by the press." There were approximately twenty-five participants, including Robert Alter. Half of them were American scholars, but there were also "one Pole, one New Zealander (Boyd), one Canadian, one East Indian, and one West German." Alter notes that "the recovery of Nabokov in the Soviet Union seems to be an activity of relatively young people," who saw Nabokov "as one of the great modern cosmopolitan writers and should not be appropriated as uniquely Russian....[although he has]remained steeped in Russian literary traditions." For them, the conference meant a recovery of "a lost Russian writer, and even, in a certain sense, the Russia that was lost with him." There were sessions in Moscow and, next, a visit to Leningrad and, as Alter soon realized, they "were to be led on a kind of Nabokov pilgrimage...there were ...some signs of a Nabokov cult in the making." After a visit to Nabokov's town house at 47 Morskaya Street, they were taken to Nabokov's estate at Vyra, the house which has been "so vividly evoked in Speak. Memory was burned to the ground by the Nazis before they fled, but the wooded landscape and the vistas of the Oredezh River are still ravishing." Says Alter that "the polished artifice of his writing is a monument more lasting than bronze to a vanished Russian culture. It expresses not only the refinement of Russian aesthetic traditions, but also a humane liberalism that stood in opposition to the absolutism of the czars." After hearing about a court case, involving the retrial of a man sentenced...to seven years in prison on a pornography charge, because he'd distributed copies of "Lolita," a book that had just been legally published in Russia, Alter recounts the testimony of a man, Mikhail Meylakh, whose career was suddenly interrupted "after his arrest in 1983 for possessing a copy of Speak, Memory." Alter notes that talking "about Nabokov in Russia makes one acutely aware of the never-never land that American academia has become. Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture. Those of us who made the journey to Moscow came away with the sense that there are still people in the world for whom literature matters urgently, for whom literature has a strong and illuminating connection with the real world. When dark limes require it, there are even people prepared to risk their freedom for the truth of a writer's vision." For Alter, Nabokov is not a "self-indulgently aesthetic writer, playing virtuoso tunes on the fiddle of private experience as the world burns.... he is a novelist obsessed with love and loss, concerned with how a misdirected aesthetic impulse twists lives and inflicts pain, with how the public realm can violate the territory of individual existence, including the sanctum of the mind," referring the three traits of Nabokov's character Brian Boyd has emphasized: "unflagging self-assurance," an "intense, almost ruthlessly concentrated feelings toward others," and "his unrelenting individualism."[Nabokov] "repeatedly demonstrated that fidelity to the imagination is a form of political courage, a recognition now shared by readers in his native land who are exercising the same rare virtue."

In his article's Part One, basing his comments on Boyd's information, Alter recounts how, in July 1934, Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Vladislav Khodasevich in "defense of art as private expression," and said to him that writers should "occupy themselves only with their own meaningless, innocent, intoxicating business," and quoting Nabokov's strong reaction against "the same herd instinct, the 'all-together-now' of. say. yesterday's or last century's enthusiasm for world's fairs." Alter understands that Nabokov, as a writer, was not rejecting politics but expressing his "refusal to contemplate the political realm on the level of fashionable formulas, with the limited language and the stunted imaginative reach of the daily press." For him, Nabokov is "an exemplary writer of the century precisely because his best work challenges easy oppositions between the aesthetic and the political, between the aesthetic and the moral." Comparing Nabokov to Proust and Joyce, he concludes that Nabokov "is more like Proust in assuming that moral issues are subtly implicated in art; and for all his dedication to art, he did not have the kind of relentless self-absorption," found in Joyce. According to Alter, with "the publication of the first volume of Brian Boyd's two-volume biography, it is now possible to get a clear picture of Nabokov's relation to Russian political and cultural history, and to the various currents of the European emigration. The clarity of the picture is especially needed because a good deal of fuzziness of detail and skewed perspective has been introduced into the public domain by Andrew Field, Nabokov's previous biographer." The reviewer sees Boyd as "a young literary scholar from New Zealand and the author of a brilliant critical study of Nabokov's Ada, has done a formidable amount of patient spadework. He has thoroughly examined the Nabokov collections at the Library of Congress and in Montreux, together with other pertinent archives, which contain a wealth of unpublished correspondence as well as some diary material. He has scrutinized the letters and the journals of everyone who came in contact with Nabokov, conducted extensive interviews with Nabokov's widow, and traveled from country to country to talk with Nabokov's sundry friends and relations...The product of these labors is a very valuable book, though it is a little peculiar as biography. Strictly respecting Nabokov's absolute dismissal of psychological determinism, Boyd offers a chastely apsychological portrait of the writer that substitutes for psychological conjecture a kind of thematic interpretation of character. A fine critic, he chafes under the onus of biographical narration, and from the moment that Nabokov becomes a professional writer in the early 1920s, almost half of every chapter is devoted to a synopsis and a critical discussion of his stories, poems, plays, and novels." Alter notes that "Symptomatically, at the midpoint of this first volume the narrative is entirely set aside for twenty-nine pages devoted 10 an admirable chapter-long essay on "Nabokov the Writer," with examples largely drawn from the American novels, not the Russian ones. In all of this, Boyd offers insights into The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, and Nabokov's general enterprise as a writer; but the momentum of biographical report is repeatedly interrupted in a way that can be frustrating. This project bids to be an impressive thousand-page critical essay on Nabokov, rich in information about his life and its sundry contexts, but its central human figure may seem a little remote...In one respect, however, the disproportion of Boyd's biography is justified" when Boyd shows how Nabokov was "above all, in Stendhal's phrase, a "writing animal." He adds that "Stylistic fireworks, intricacies of formal design, cunningly encrypted games of allusion, anagram, and motif, are the hallmarks of Nabokov's fiction, but the chief power of Boyd's reading is his argument...that all this play with form and surface has carefully meditated metaphysical implications." ...Boyd "argues for an essential connection between the meticulous empiricism of Nabokov's activity as an entomologist and his concerns as a writer:'Nabokov accepted the world as real, so real that there is always more and more to know — about the scales of a butterfly wing, about a line of Pushkin'."
Alter believes that although "there is no indication that Nabokov read the Formalists...Viktor Shklovsky's famous declaration on the escape from automatic perception through art could be a motto for Nabokov's writing: 'Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.' One could construe both Nabokov and the Russian Formalists as parallel responses to a very modern sense of the decay of experience — a process of cultural devolution vividly described in this same period from another angle by Waller Benjamin." Nevertheless he finds in Nabokov, differently from the Formalist's emphasis on experience as "potent sensation", that "...sensation and pellucid knowledge as an indissoluble fusion....Nabokov assumed, as Boyd implies, that reality was a kind of infinite regress of related but unique entities — snowflakes and souls — endlessly and unpredictably linked with each other through hidden patterns, layer after layer or level after level of "reality" dimly glimmering behind the one we strive to see. That is why the finely discriminated details in his fiction are repeatedly set in a barely visible web of larger connective designs...Finally, beneath all the ingenuity in Nabokov, there is the most poignant sense of a loss... " He sees Nabokov repeatedly tripping "the reader off the beaten path of conventional response:"... using a detailed and precise description of perceptual phenomenon with exciting metaphors, vigorous expressions, wordgames...Nabokov's frequent allusions to Tolstoy (he is examining at the moment King,Queen,Knave) reflects his "constant awareness that all representations of reality in fiction take place against a large and complex background of established representational techniques and specific memorable instances of representation."...motivated by the desire "to catch what to the "communal eye" (a phrase he uses scornfully in Pale Fire) lay below the threshold of perception...pure sensory experience" He belies that these "considerations may help us understand what is involved in the vehemence of Nabokov's rejection in his letter to Khodasevich of all the ways of talking and seeing that he associates with the 'herd instinct'." Alter informs us that Boyd, following Gleb Struve, notes that Nabokov, "especially in the 1930s, devotes a good deal of his writing to political topics, for all his aestheticism"[...] Still, the essential way in which Nabokov's fiction is a serious response to twentieth-century politics is not in these intermittent confrontations with explicitly political questions, but in an underlying assumption about the relation of consciousness to reality." He adds: "Art, for Nabokov, was neither a luxury nor an escape. It was the last line of freedom's defense, the most powerful and concrete demonstration that the mind was unfettered, that there was 'always more' of reality than the official repressive versions made out....Nabokov's fiction is devised as a sustained campaign of resistance against all who try lo displace the strangeness with a flat, coercively prescribed plan of reality."

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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