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  • Vladimir Nabokov, writes Brian Boyd, "becomes a kind of personal trainer in mental flexibility."
    Vladimir Nabokov, writes Brian Boyd, "becomes a kind of personal trainer in mental flexibility."
    Credit: AFP / Getty Images

'Stalking Nabokov,' by Brian Boyd: review


January 01, 2012|Eric Naiman, Special to The Chronicle








Stalking Nabokov

Selected Essays

By Brian Boyd

(Columbia University Press; 464 pages; $35)

When asked in an interview if his novels were not in some way all about the same thing, Vladimir Nabokov replied: "Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy." Nabokov, like many first-rate novelists, enjoyed and reveled in his principal themes - style, sex and metafiction - and many scholars have found his work similarly addicting. "I have tried many times to stop writing about him," Brian Boyd writes near the start of "Stalking Nabokov," "but ... he keeps on setting me new assignments, making me offers I cannot refuse."

Boyd, the author of Nabokov's definitive, two-volume biography, here covers Nabokov's relation to many subjects - including lepidoptery, evolution, psychology, humor, poetry and translation. His range, like Nabokov's, is impressive, but his strength is in close reading. The chapters here on specific novels are absolutely fascinating, as is the discussion of Nabokov and Tolstoy.

Especially good is Boyd's study of "Lolita's" mistakes in dating - we're talking calendar here, not courtship. Boyd is in his element when he digs through a text, tearing it apart and putting it back together.

(You can spend an entire weekend with Boyd's books on "Ada" or "Pale Fire," hunting along with him through the novels' internal correspondences; those are the rare works of criticism that you just cannot put down.)

His faith in the salutary properties of reading Nabokov is uniquely compelling: Nabokov "becomes a kind of personal trainer in mental flexibility, his novels [are] workouts that stretch our capacity for attention, curiosity, imagination, and memory not to stress our limits, as so often in twentieth-century literature, but to extend them."

There are some interesting new tidbits in this collection, particularly where Boyd quotes from unpublished sources, including Nabokov's belief that "only through laughter do mortals get to heaven," and his comment to his students that "in the course of the historical evolution of literature ... the various senses become keener [so that] Shakespeare saw colors more distinctly than Homer and a poet of today sees color more distinctly than Shakespeare." How wonderful that Nabokov sees "lolling and loafing" and not "the survival of the fittest" as the crucial force in "the initial blossoming of man's mind."

Particularly interesting is the change in Nabokov's attitude toward "Anna Karenina." In his youth, Nabokov considered "Madame Bovary" "2000 metres higher" than Tolstoy's novel, which he attacked for its "grand looseness of style: the word 'house' is repeated 8 times in the course of the first paragraph."

When he began teaching the book, however, Nabokov changed his mind: "The word dom (house, household, home) is repeated eight times in the course of six sentences. This ponderous and solemn repetition, dom, dom, dom, tolling as it does for doomed family life (one of the main themes of the book), is a deliberate device on Tolstoy's part."







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