Stalking Nabokov Read online

  Stalking Nabokov

  Stalking Nabokov

  SELECTED ESSAYS

  Brian Boyd

  Columbia University Press New York

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-53029-3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boyd, Brian, 1952–

  Stalking Nabokov : selected essays / Brian Boyd.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-231-15856-5 (cloth : acid-free paper)

  ISBN 978-0-231-53029-3 (e-book)

  1. Nabokov, Vladimar Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—

  Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

  PG3476.N3Z587 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2011008348

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  To Bronwen

  and to my friends in the Nabokov world

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  List of Abbreviations

  Introduction

  Nabokov: The Writer’s Life and the Life Writer

  1. A Centennial Toast (1999)

  2. A Biographer’s Life (2001)

  3. Who Is “My Nabokov”? (2007)

  Nabokov’s Manuscripts and Books

  4. The Nabokov Biography and the Nabokov Archive (1992)

  5. From the Nabokov Archive: Nabokov’s Literary Legacy (2009)

  Nabokov’s Metaphysics

  6. Retrospects and Prospects (2001)

  7. Nabokov’s Afterlife (2002)

  Nabokov’s Butterflies

  8. Nabokov, Literature, Lepidoptera (2000)

  9. Netting Nabokov: Review of Dieter E. Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, 2001 (2001)

  Nabokov as Psychologist

  10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play (2010)

  Nabokov and the Origins and Ends of Stories

  11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks (2010)

  Nabokov as Writer

  12. Nabokov’s Humor (1996)

  13. Nabokov as Storyteller (2002)

  14. Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution? (2007)

  Nabokov and Others

  15. Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire (1999)

  16. Nabokov as Verse Translator: Introduction to Verses and Versions (2008)

  17. Tolstoy and Nabokov (1993)

  18. Nabokov and Machado de Assis (2009)

  Nabokov Works

  19. Speak, Memory: The Life and the Art (1990)

  20. Speak, Memory: Nabokov, Mother, and Lovers: The Weave of the Magic Carpet (1999)

  21. Lolita: Scene and Unseen (2006)

  22. Even Homais Nods: Nabokov’s Fallibility; Or, How to Revise Lolita (1995)

  23. Literature, Pattern, Lolita; Or, Art, Literature, Science (2008)

  24. “Pale Fire”: Poem and Pattern (2010)

  25. Ada: The Bog and the Garden; Or, Straw, Fluff, and Peat: Sources and Places in Ada (2004)

  26. A Book Burner Recants: The Original of Laura (2010)

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the late Vladimir Nabokov for giving readers, and especially this reader, such pleasure, the late Véra Nabokov for inviting me to sort out her husband’s archives and for trusting me enough to tolerate my researching his biography; and Dmitri Nabokov and the late Elena Sikorski for their support, hospitality, and friendship, and Dmitri also for permission to quote all unpublished Nabokov material.

  I would like to thank the following writers, editors, publishers, colleagues, students, and friends for inviting me to contribute to conferences, journals, books, talks, or discussions, or for ideas or feedback, or for giving me permission to reproduce the material that follows: Martin Amis, Harold Augenbraum (then of Mercantile Library of New York), André Bernard (then of Harcourt), Marijeta Bozovic (then of Ulbandus), Matthew Brillinger, Lisa Browar (then of the New York Public Library), Patricia Carr Brückmann (Trinity College, University of Toronto), Linda Corman (Trinity College Library, University of Toronto), Mo Cohen (Gingko Press), Julian Connolly, Peter Craven (then of Scripsi), Galya Diment, Alexander Dolinin, Kristin Eliasberg (then of PEN Center, New York), George Gibian, Jane Grayson (then of SEES, University of London), R. S. Gwynn, Jean Holabird, Don Barton Johnson (including as editor of Nabokov Studies), Kurt Johnson, Frederic R. Karl (Bibliography and Source Studies), Zoran Kuzmanovich (including as editor of Nabokov Studies), Shoko Miura (Nabokov Society of Japan), Akiko Nakata (Nabokov Society of Japan), Fred Neubauer (Einhard Foundation), Will Norman, Mitsuyoshi Numano (Nabokov Society of Japan), Stephen Jan Parker (including as editor of The Nabokovian), Rodney Phillips (then of the New York Public Library), Robert Michael Pyle, Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Stanislas Shvabrin, Claudio Soares, Vadim Stark (then of the Institute of Russian Literature and Art, St. Petersburg), Mio Suda (Gunzo), Anthony Uhlmann (Australasian Association for Literature), Deanne Urmy (then of Beacon Press), Frédéric Verger (La Revue des Deux Mondes), Olga Voronina (then of the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg), Tadashi Wakashima (Nabokov Society of Japan), Duncan White, Robert Wilson (American Scholar), Dieter E. Zimmer, and Irene Zohrab (New Zealand Slavonic Journal). There are many other Nabokovian friends, including some of the most gifted, distinguished, and treasured, with whom I have exchanged ideas and information or from whom I have received invitations, whose names are not listed here only because space is finite and gratitude endless, and because I do not remember specific debts to them in any of these pieces. But for other debts, friendship, and common interests, you are certainly included in the dedication, after Bronwen, to whom I owe most.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  Books by Vladimir Nabokov unless otherwise noted. For full bibliographical details, see the bibliography.

  Ada Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  BS Bend Sinister

  CE Conclusive Evidence

  DBDV Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971

  EO Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. with commentary by Vladimir Nabokov

  Gift The Gift

  IB Invitation to a Beheading

  KQK King, Queen, Knave

  LAS Lolita: A Screenplay

  LATH Look at the Harlequins!

  LDQ Lectures on Don Quixote

  LL Lectures on Literature

  Lolita The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. (1st ed., 1970)

  LRL Lectures on Russian Literature

  MUSSR The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

  NAPC Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (2nd ed., 2001)

  NG Nikolay Gogol

  NPFMAD Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery

  N’sBs Nabokov’s Butterflies

  PF Pale Fire

  PP Poems and Problems

  RLSK The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  SIC The Song of Igor’s Campaign.

  SL Selected Letters, 1940–1977

  SM Speak, Memory (1967)

  SO Strong Opinions’

  SoVN Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

  TT Transparent Things

  VNA Vladimir Nabokov Archive, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library

  VNAY Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years

  VNRY Brian Boyd, Vl
adimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

  INTRODUCTION

  I was born two generations after Vladimir Nabokov. A butterfly location label in the Cornell Lepidoptera collection tells me that on the day of my birth, at Scout Creek near the “altogether enchanting little town of Afton,” Wyoming (SO 323), Nabokov stalked and caught a female of a butterfly of a new subspecies he had named three years earlier (Lycaeides argyrognomon longinus Nabokov 1949).1 That day, I could express myself only by squalling, but Nabokov almost certainly added to the manuscript of Lolita, perhaps even the passage in the Men’s Room of the Enchanted Hunters Hotel— “There a person in clerical black—a ‘hearty party’ comme on dit—checking with the assistance of Vienna, if it was still there, inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk, and looked puzzled when I (King Sigmund the Second) said Boyd was quite a boy”—or the fatal passage describing the next morning: “and for some minutes I miserably dozed, and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage Dr. Boyd said ‘Good morning to you’ in a fruity voice, and birds were busy in the trees, and then Lolita yawned” (Lolita 127, 134).2

  In high school, long before I became Dr. Boyd, I began reading Nabokov so intensely that his way of seeing the world partly shaped mine. I started a doctoral dissertation on his work while he was still alive, but to my shock and consternation learned that he was not time-proof and that I would be writing most of it after his death. For Véra Nabokov I catalogued the paper pile he had left behind in Montreux, Switzerland, and for his biography I followed his trail across Russia, England, Western Europe, and America. Since completing the biography I have explored new fields, but Nabokov keeps pulling me back. By now I have published a pile of my own on him, some of it well known, some not. When recently I had reason to consult one of my less well-known efforts, I decided others might like to see this stuff.

  Lately literary critics and scholars tend to avoid a single-author focus, partly because authors have been downgraded as the causes of literary works. That’s a mistake, I think:3 nothing like “The Library of Babel,” Lolita, or Waiting for Godot would have been written in the mid-twentieth century or at any other time had Borges, Nabokov, and Beckett not lived, even had history otherwise run the same course. Nabokov famously denied the influence of any other writer on him and thought “the climate of thought” an “unbelievably spooky” notion (SO 128). But for all his insistence on independence he did not suppose writers were self-generated. They owed much, as he knew, to purposes, standards, and tools developed and refined over the ages, and to the boldness of past genius inspiring future risks (see this volume, chapter 15, “Nabokov, Pushkin, Shakespeare: Genius, Generosity, and Gratitude in The Gift and Pale Fire”).

  The best criticism, too, is highly individual but also part of highly social processes, and that’s another thread that runs through these pieces. Criticism is cooperative: we want to understand the same works, and we learn from others both specific information and ways of understanding and appreciating. And it is competitive: we want to challenge others whose claims we find wrong, and we want our efforts and results to be recognized. In my work on evolution and literature, the one line of research after Nabokov I have so far had time to pursue to something near satisfaction, I have explored the interplay of the individual and the social, the collaborative and the competitive, the original insight or the independent effort and the traditions and institutions that make the insight and effort possible and worthwhile.

  Another thread running through Stalking Nabokov is the range that specialization can entail. Specialists may become too narrow, but Nabokov himself wonderfully evoked to his literature students the magic of discovery that specialization could allow:

  The more things we know the better equipped we are to understand any one thing and it is a burning pity that our lives are not long enough and sufficiently free of annoying obstacles, to study all things with the same care and depth as the one we now devote to some favorite subject or period. And yet there is a semblance of consolation within this dismal state of affairs: in the same way as the whole universe may be completely reciprocated in the structure of an atom, … an intelligent and assiduous student [may] find a small replica of all knowledge in a subject he has chosen for his special research…. and if, upon choosing your subject, you try diligently to find out about it, if you allow yourself to be lured into the shaded lanes that lead from the main road you have chosen to the lovely and little known nooks of special knowledge, if you lovingly finger the links of the many chains that connect your subject to the past and the future and if by luck you hit on some scrap of knowledge referring to your subject that has not yet become common knowledge, then you will know the true felicity of the great adventure of learning, and your years in this college will become a valuable start on a road of inestimable happiness.

  (N’sBs 399)

  In his eight years as a professional scientist in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov focused on one family of butterflies, the Plebejinae or Blues, and found it hard to tear himself away from the microscope just as, in the next decade, he found it hard to stop researching Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (“but what things I’m finding, what discoveries I’m making”)4 until he had amassed over a thousand pages of annotations. He had different specializations—Lepidoptera, literary scholarship and translation, chess problems, and literary composition—and each required a multitude of approaches: in the case of Lepidoptera, for instance, taxonomy, morphology, ecology (and the botany of food plants), geography, evolution; in his literary art, at various times, subordinate specializations, in the life of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, late-nineteenth-century Russian naturalists’ explorations of Central Asia, pubescent American girls and their culture, Nordic lore, orchids, the philosophy of time. In the same way, a research specialization like mine on Nabokov has required language learning, interpretation, annotation, bibliography, translation, forays into many literatures and into history, geography, philosophy, science, and psychology. It has meant the continued excitement of discovery; travels to five continents; meetings with the Nabokov family and writers, publishers, scientists, scholars, and librarians who worked with or after him; dialogues with readers famous and obscure; documentary filming; naming new butterflies; and even a law trial. And the best antidote to the confines of one kind specialization can be to follow orthogonal lines of specialization: in my case, Shakespeare, partly as a comparison and contrast to Nabokov within literature and as an alternative delight; as a contrast and comparison to Nabokov within twentieth-century thought, the philosopher Karl Popper, with his specializations in the philosophy of science, physics, music, and social philosophy and his preference for ideas over words; narrative, from Homer and Genesis to the present, across all modes, from epics to comics; and literature and evolution, which has meant exploring across arts and eras and into biology, anthropology, and many fields of psychology. Readers of Stalking Nabokov will see these other specializations from time to time crossing my Nabokov trail and offering glimpses of other vistas.

  Brian Boyd

  Auckland

  December 24, 2009

  THE WRITER’S LIFE AND THE LIFE WRITER

  1. A Centennial Toast

  In the wake of my Nabokov biographies (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 1990, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 1991), people surfaced with links to Nabokov that I had not traced. Through my work with lepidopterists who had known Nabokov or specialized in the same butterfly families as he had, I learned of John Downey, the expert in the Blues a generation after Nabokov. As a biology student driving a mining truck for his summer job, Downey had met Nabokov collecting butterflies on the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains in 1943, an encounter that inspired him to become a specialist in the Blues himself. Discovering this incident allowed me to reflect on Nabokov as writer and man at a Nabokov Centenary Celebration organized by the PEN American Center, the New Yorker, and Vintage Books, on April 15, 1999, at the Town Hall in New York (with Martin Amis, Alfre
d Appel Jr., Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and others). That summer, another celebration took place, at the end of a conference at Jesus College, Cambridge, organized by Jane Grayson of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London: a centennial dinner in the Hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, where Nabokov dined in his Trinity years (1919–1922). Asked to deliver the centennial toast, I slightly expanded the New York talk.

  I would like us all to fix in our minds a famous image captured by Dmitri Nabokov’s camera: his father in shorts, bare-chested, with butterfly net at the ready, on a Swiss mountainside, underneath an azure sky. I want us to be able to picture just who it is we are toasting—and not to be distracted by another famous figure showing off his famous legs.1 We shall return in a moment to the man in shorts.

  In a much-quoted passage from Speak, Memory Nabokov describes a chess problem he composed in such a way that the relationship between composer and solver serves as an analogy for the relationship between author and reader that he aims for in his fiction: an immediate pleasure for the “naïve” solver (the “thesis” of the problem, in the Hegelian terms he invokes); the “pleasurable torments” awaiting the “would-be sophisticated solver” who realizes there’s more to the problem (the “antithesis”); and the rush of surprise and delight awaiting the “super-sophisticated solver” who reaches the problem’s deepest solution (the “synthesis”) (SM 290–92). Writing my biography of Nabokov I did not discover in time an incident that I think offers a similar kind of analogy to his literary work, but in terms of butterflies, not chess.

  In 1943 a biology student named John Downey was working in his summer vacation in the mountains of Utah. Driving a coal truck one day up the steep Cottonwood Canyon, he found he had to stop every so often to let the engine cool down. After pulling over at a bend, and opening the truck’s hood, he noticed a man in shorts and sneakers with no shirt coming down the road with a net in his hand. As the man passed, Downey called out, “Hullo. Whatcha doing? Collecting insects?” The man gave a sharp glance at this stranger covered in coal dust, said nothing, and continued down the road at the same brisk pace. Downey fell in behind him: “ ‘I’m a collector too!’ This got a millisecond glance, and one raised eyebrow, as he strolled along. ‘I collect butterflies.’… This rated…another raised eyebrow, if not a slight nod of the head; but still no sound, nor slowing of his pace.”