Vladimir Nabokov

...Nabokov inhabits them so that he can have his revenge on history by imitating its perversity and outdoing it, and then he destroys them to slay the tyrant in himself and exalt the artist...

...she wore a black mask with a wolf's profile, which she refused to lower until the dandyish young author followed her outside...

...In the Nabokovian cosmos an individual life serves as the stage on which an exultant consciousness can carry on its dialogue with time, mortality, and death...

...Instead there has been a misplaced protectiveness toward Nabokov, the understandable reaction to his never having received the Nobel Prize, an omission many Nabokovians blame on the conception of Nabokov as a coldhearted aesthete...

...Absent from Boyd's account is even the most cautious hint at the inner exorcisms that lie behind a work of art and invest it with the power to wrest belief from the clutches of common sense...

...I doubt anyone will ever again be able to dismiss—or commend—Nabokov as an airy puzzlemaker indulging a superficial cruelty toward his hapless creations...

...It's as if these two necessary volumes were a deft gesture from beyond the grave, the impish last flourish of an author whose deepest conviction and most precious ruse was that his human reality lay entirely in his imaginative works...

...Brian Boyd—the alliteration would have given Nabokov great pleasure—has correctively presented Nabokov the author as a goodhearted humanist, and Nabokov the man as an ideal husband, a perfect father, and a faultless friend...

...Psychoanalysis' contribution to modern democracy left him cold...

...he wasn't about to allow what he regarded as the specially devised formation of his character and imagination to be couched, so to speak, in terms of run-of-the-mill influences anyone could lay claim to...

...For both better and worse, Nabokov's current biographer has fixed his approach to his subject's life along the same aesthetic lines...

...A connoisseur of memory, the loftily independent Nabokov left no doubt about how he wanted to be remembered...

...But this treasure of imaginative knowledge came from someplace...

...But it's disappointing that not a single reviewer bothered to mention, one way or another, that in order to defend Nabokov against the charge of formalism, Boyd has written the first-ever formalist biog24: 5 June 1992 Commonweal raphy...

...Responding to critics who see in Nabokov's excessively devastating review of the English translation of Sartre's La Nausée a connection to Sartre's earlier dismissive review of the French translation of Nabokov's Despair, Boyd assures everyone that Nabokov had "no personal axe to grind" and hastily passes on to more straightforward matters...

...An analogously implausible biographical image would be an Augustine who comes to Carthage as to a cauldron bubbling with professional options, immediately applies to divinity school, and following graduation confidently settles down as the upwardly mobile head of an affluent congregation...

...Three years later, having been deprived by Lenin, then Stalin, and then Hitler of both his ancestral and his linguistic estate, Nabokov entered New York harbor with his wife and son...

...Where it came from is still a moldy chest sunken in the depths of Nabokov's life...

...Among other things Brian Boyd's two-volume biography, first The Russian Years and now The American Years (both books gorgeously printed and bound by Princeton University Press), sets itself the task of placing Nabokov in a wholly different light...

...Sad but true," added Jan Morris...

...All those gaps are to Boyd's credit since he has accomplished what he set out to do: take for granted his subject's life as if it were a routine sublimation of the work...

...There is barely a peep about how Nabokov lived in society...

...So the narrative goes, lovingly performing a cover-up job through nearly seven hundred pages, following Nabokov through teaching positions at Stanford, Wellesley, Harvard, and finally Cornell, minutely describing his numerous "lepping" trips, and occasionally pausing to unfold the drama of the author stopping work on one project to begin work on another...

...In the end, Boyd could be forgiven his immoderate discretions if in his labor of loyalty and disguise he had not unwittingly taken the satyr out of satire, and cast an odd ray of sunlight over the dark laughter that winds through Nabokov's fiction...

...In keeping it submerged, Boyd has produced the biography that Nabokov, one of the most gifted writers of this century, has long deserved...

...Exiled and bereaved, young Vladimir was fortunately provided with an unflappable muse...

...One spring night in 1922 a Russian monarchist unintentionally shot to death the senior Nabokov, who had been trying to protect the socialist revolutionary Milyukov, who in fact had been Nabokov's bitter ideological enemy...

...Humbert Humbert in Lolita and Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire are not just the loathsome creatures of Nabokov's fancy that Boyd would like us to see them as...

...Such events gave Nabokov a unique sense of destiny...

...On the one hand, it's a pure delight to encounter Boyd's respect for his subject, his intelligent and sympathetic readings of Nabokov's works, his factual scrupulosity and his own sense of literary style...

...No wonder then that he took a perennial joy in firing off barbs at Freudians and their archetypes...

...Nabokov, Vladimir's distinguished liberal aristocrat father, whisked his family westward away from the Russian Revolution, Vladimir found himself on the deck of a Greek freighter with the Russian name I've said, we hardly hear of them, they are always silently present, keeping the author from getting around and meeting the people who would give his book life...

...The unanimous answer was yes...

...Nabokov, it might be said, regarded circumstance as painted backdrop and personality as theatrical garb...

...In retrieving it with Boyd's degree of sympathy and intelligence, someone someday will write a biography that will be worthy of Nabokov's readers Commonweal 5 June 1992: 25...

...That is to say, Boyd has gone more than a tad overboard...

...Boyd blithely declares that "[Nabokov's] condescension was prompted not so much by Austen's gender...as by her adherence to eighteenth-century convention...

...When it is successful, all art is realistic...

...about his famous feud with Edmund Wilson, for example...

...For the lepidopterist who craved the ephemeral beauty of his catches and then crushed their thoraxes and pinned them to a board— without ever being certain that the specimen he had caught was not one of the last of its line—divided himself between predator and victim in his fiction...

...They are brimming over with their creator's liveliest genes...

...and hardly a word from the many people still alive who knew him...

...Boyd, however, has composed Nabokov's biography the way Nabokov would have written it himself...

...they seek control without tenderness, ecstasy without self-surrender...

...Settling in along with the cream of Russian intellectual and artistic life, the family took up residence in Berlin, in the midst of the sometimes violent byways of émigré politics...

...Lee Siegel Though he hoarded the physical details of existence with the exactness of a miser or a voluptuary, Vladimir Nabokov believed that without the recombining wiles of memory and imagination plain facts amount to nothing in the way of truth...

...When V.D...

...Persisting in his craft, he began to make a reputation for himself in Russian émigré circles as a writer of fiction, poetry, and drama under the pen name Sirin...

...If Nabokov pulled conjuror's tricks in his work, if he made startling swerves from one level of reality to another, it was partly because life came to him in remarkable patterns and coincidences...

...On its next Commonweal 5 June 1992: 23 voyage the ship that had brought them over was sunk by a German U-boat...

...Last year at the Key West Literary Seminar on Travel Writing, a distinguished panel was asked if travel writing had to be a solitary pursuit...

...or about the time he spent in Hollywood writing the screenplay for Lolita...

...Yet in the lunatic games they play with the lives of other people, they possess an artistic temperament but lack the artistic gift...

...Regret mixed with gratitude probably led some reviewers mistakenly to put Boyd's fairy tale on a par with Ellman's biography of Joyce, as well as Leon Edel's life of Henry James...

...There is freedom and grace in Nabokov's daring escapes from narrative plane to narrative plane, as if he envisioned humankind shackled and locked in history's trunk, and conceived of the act of literary sleight-of-hand as a moral victory...

...In the introduction to his first volume, Boyd writes that the contradictions in Nabokov's life "can be resolved...

...If he absurdly didn't like women writers...

...In 1937 Nabokov, Vera, and their young son Dmitri fled Germany to France, where they lived three years in desperate poverty despite Nabokov's widening renown beyond his original expatriate audience...

...Nadezhda (hope) playing chess with Nabokov senior as Bolshevik machine guns fired down into Sebastopol harbor...

...If the servants at the luxury hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, where Nabokov spent his last years really didn't "adore" their most famous guest...

...And if Nabokov had relieved himself of a grudge...

...They are in another class...

...He met his future wife Vera (faith) at a charity ball in Berlin...

...Yet the unflattering revelations of an artist's days provide an ethical basis for curiosity—so much goodness for the collective memory rising out of so much transient mud...

...My advice to Keneally: Next time, leave home without them...

...In a class lecture for his literature course at Cornell, he roared at a roomful of dutifully note-taking undergraduates: I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tompeeping over the fence of those lives—I hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time—and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life...

...His book did little to dispel some readers' notion of Nabokov as an icy aristocrat of unkind spirit, whose two chief extra-literary recreations were collecting butterflies and enjoying schadenfreude—just the sort of fellow who would get a rarefied thrill out of torturing readers with the abstruse deceits and reflecting enigmas that flicker through Nabokov's work...

...Thus, in the current volume, twenty pages after quoting Nabokov on Jane Austen in a letter to Edmund Wilson—"I dislike Jane, and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers...

...After graduating from Cambridge, Nabokov returned to Berlin and supported himself with odd jobs, including stints as an extra in German films...

...It hardly seems worth telling the story of a life that didn't have at least two sides...

...Nabokov's first biographer, Andrew Field, after being teasingly led by his prospective subject through a lengthy courtship dance, wrote a work marred by factual errors and far-flung speculation...