The Nabokov Method

...Stegner, for example, in addition to imbibing Nabokov's assumptions, has taken on his intonations (those witty asides, those intricate insults) and prejudices, including—amazing paradox—a distrust of criticism...

...Congeries is most interesting in this light, for the appearance of still another volume of reworked old material helps forge a view of Nabokov quite distinct from his own and, consequently, untouched by his insidious eloquence...

...Page Stegner, author of a full-length study of him, has written an introductory essay for Congeries that exemplifies the difficulty of trying to elucidate the fiction with the great man hovering just offstage: Nabokov and the "irretrievable past," the "delusive moves," the "spirality of things"?the themes and qualities which Stegner lists ring true not only because they are in the fiction (though why necessarily a "spiral" and not, say, a vortex or a double helix...

...Pnin, for example, is mocked as socially clumsy by all the other characters of the book, but achieves a more important grace by being in tune with the basic rhythm of the Nabokovian world: "[Pnin's] research had long since entered the charmed stage where the guest overrides the goal and a new organism is formed . . . Pnin averted his mental gaze from the end of the work . . . this land was to be shunned as the doom of everything that determined the rapture of endless approximation...

...the purely literary aspects of Nabokov's books...

...Nabokov almost certainly would not agree with this formulation...

...8.50) must be considered more than a commercial device...

...Nabokov's eloquence is so great that even basically unfriendly critics have often fought their battles on the sites he has selected...

...Nabokov's fiction often reflects his concern with fastidious creation, not only in the intricate style, which always calls attention to itself, but in the dynamics of the novel's world...

...Congeries includes a chapter from Nabokov's book on Gogol, and much of that book represents some rather ungracious scholarship...

...Not content with having given many of his characters traits and histories similar to his own, Nabokov apparently will end by transforming critics into his own image as well...

...Nabokov's view of most of his readers as fools or worse would hardly prevent him from pocketing their $8.50 for a gimcrack of reprints...

...Nabokov is too consummate a craftsman to ever publish a book without first stamping it with the markings of his complex personality...

...Nabokov's sense of precarious balance between quest and goal necessarily invests his endings with special significance, for they mark the termination of the quest, their typical abruptness, even violence, symbolizing Nabokov's dismay at having to leave his craft and allow the book out into the world...

...Some 70 pages of Nabokov's critical writings are marshaled here...

...The seeming completeness of a Nabokov character, his density, often comes from ballast outside the book...

...Ultimately, it does not really matter which image comes to mind...

...The author's lack of sympathy for his characters, his overly esoteric references, his immorality—these are merely negative definitions of the image Nabokov has chosen for himself...

...A series of such discoveries may allow us to establish a critical position outside Nabokov's sway that nevertheless manages to appreciate his genius...

...Other facts deemed of no concern to anyone include an author's political ideas, the epoch he lived in, his biography...

...But Congeries (Viking...

...Thus these essays acquire a strategic significance, for the responses they elicit—responses more to style than to an argument—cannot be easily renounced when confronting the fiction...

...Unfortunately, repeating Nabokov's own ideas, only not as brilliantly, results in less than interesting criticism...

...536 pp...

...In the Russian version of Despair, the narrator describes his perverse pleasure in reworking the Russian classics: ". . . in my rendering of [Pushkin's] The Shot, Silvio, without superfluous words, killed the cherry-lover outright, and with him the plot . . ." When Nabokov translated this passage into English he substituted the more familiar Othello for The Shot, and as an example of the narrator's perverse reworkings suggested a version where "the Moor was skeptical and Desdemona unfaithful...

...The puns, puzzles and deceptions of Pale Fire do more than provide passing amusement...

...Nabokov, it becomes increasingly clear, has a great reluctance to part with his books...

...The unconscious tension between quest and goal, between the joys of performance and those of achievement, has here revealed itself in an inconspicuous gesture...

...Why it should exist at all is an intriguing question, though the obvious answer (money) is probably not altogether wrong...

...Now especially considering that Nabokov had all the world's literature to choose from, his reworking of Othello is curiously inappropriate to the point of the original passage: Making the Moor skeptical would not cut the plot short but prolong it indefinitely...

...but also because Nabokov himself has urged their centrality so persuasively...

...Thus, though Congeries is of little intrinsic worth, it provides evidence of the author's literary method...

...Here Nabokov says, "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English devoid of those apparatuses . . . which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way...

...They are crotchety in an attractive way...

...Among the essays in this new book is "On a Book Entitled Lolita," originally an afterword to the novel...

...No matter—it is best to establish Nabokov's basic concerns despite him...

...Behind the pompous Dr...

...One more instance then, where Nabokov, intent on other things, reveals his vacillation between quest and goal...

...more important, they are strikingly of a piece with the rest of his output both in their manner and in their literary assumptions...

...The artistic juggle, no matter how brilliantly sustained, must here collapse into reality...

...Critical polemic, though, is only one way Nabokov constructs a context he can manipulate...

...But Nabokov also builds the problem into larger structures, and the balance he strikes can inform a whole novel...

...Only an author with a remarkably retentive attitude toward his output would have bothered to put Lolita into Russian...

...It is therefore not surprising that Nabokov, for all his professed contempt of critics, often alludes to these attacks...

...and perhaps his genius has earned him such bounty...

...The tone of his allusions is exasperation bordering on weariness, but their persistence suggests an interest in continuing the debate...

...Criticism as well as reading has been affected by Nabokov's prepossessing figure...

...Let him maintain himself in comfort and keep producing masterpieces...

...though here, too, Nabokov with his butterfly net and mad gleam may be the most satisfactory counterpoise to the text...

...In some ways Congeries may make it still more difficult to get beyond Nabokov's seductive cadences...

...Nabokov, of course, has loudly proclaimed his disdain for such a focus, laying down the way he should be read in a steady stream of directives, epigrams, and cautionary tales: The author's attitudes count for nothing, the book itself is everything...

...Behind the beautiful description of butterfly hunting in The Gift shimmers that photograph in a national magazine showing Nabokov in poncho and Bermuda shorts, butterfly net in hand, a mad gleam in his eye...

...A labor of love, no doubt, a paean to his native language, but curiously tenacious also...

...The view of Gogol as a realist, which Nabokov suggests he is singlehandedly destroying, had already been undermined by a whole generation of Russian critics, none of whom is mentioned...

...These proscriptions, however, have perversely worked in reverse, for their wit, erudition and fury have defined the speaker only too well...

...The book will have almost no readers as long as the Soviet regime endures...

...This is not an evaluation—Nabokov's Gogol is in any case more brilliant than its sources—but it is refreshing to see that the man does not fit perfectly the image he advertises...

...What Nabokov puts forth as original and daring was really decidedly derivative...

...In fact, it would be hard to imagine a writer more present in his work...

...By this point in Nabokov's career it has become impossible to read him innocently...

...What is left still adds up to a plausible approach to literature, but one that is difficult to apply to Nabokov, since he keeps smuggling out all those facts he would seemingly deny us...

...but at least we should choose for ourselves the extraliterary facts to be considered, instead of making do with the ones he foists on us...

...Nabokov has made all aspects of his personality so well known, and done it so adroitly, that the reader finds it impossible to stay attuned to Victor Ripp, a previous contributor, is the translator of the forthcoming Selected Essays of Peter Kropotkin...

...they curve into a general heady sense of prolonged ambiguity, and when that last page, with all its violence and revelations, explodes before us, it is not only the novel's ending but the triumphant confrontation of a central problem: It seems as if Nabokov has suddenly spewed forth a whole philosophical system, fully fashioned, all questions resolved...

...Eric Wind, the psychoanalyst in Pain, stand all those barbs in Nabokov's prefaces at the "Viennese Delegation...

...he is too aware of his readers' response (to his mind largely inadequate and stolid) for his choice of material to be devoid of a strategy...

...he is always recalling them, working up new formats, translations, even retranslations, as he did with Speak, Memory, which went from English to Russian and back again...

...Far from destroying this image, most of these critics end by shoring it up, buttressing it with their curiously irrelevant arguments...

...For instance, we are always aware of his feat of switching to "second-rate" English, and never more so than when he declares his handicap in that startling prose...