Early Nabokov

Nabokov's first writings went against the grain of intellectual fashions and barely put bread on the table.

Vladimir Nabokov was a man of numerous, definite, and often contradictory opinions. The strength of his convictions often impelled him into conflict with his contemporaries--including Edmund Wilson, who befriended him soon after he arrived in the United States, and an earlier biographer, Andrew Field. This most recent biographer--Brian Boyd, senior lecturer in English at the University of Auckland--has been wise enough to undertake his work after Nabokov's life was completed (he died in 1977).

But Boyd is also bothered by the contradictions to be found in Nabokov's opinions and life, and feels himself obliged to resolve them. A portion of the "challenge" he faced in writing this biography, he says in his introduction, has been to tease out the harmony in Nabokov's life ... without suppressing the inconsistencies. ... How could someone with such a passion for literature, painting, and the abstraction and patterning of chess find music no more than "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds?"…How could he believe so unshakably in democracy and never vote? Nabokov declared he knew nothing of social class and could remember twenty years later not only the cleaning lady of the laboratory where he once worked but even her domestic troubles. How then could he appear so snobbish to so many? Such apparent contradictions can be resolved.

So, at least, the biographer contends. But a writer is neither a philosopher nor a logician, and it is not in the least obligatory for all the illogicalities of any human life to be resolved. Pushkin, the man Nabokov admired most in the history of Russian literature, felt no compulsion to eliminate all the contradictions of the fictional world he created, and a good biographer need not be distressed if inconsistencies remain in the intellectual construct that he gives to us, his readers. And Boyd, after devoting nearly a decade to the research and writing of this large biography, does not in fact seek consistency at all costs.

Like Dmitry Mirsky, author of the classic history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Nabokov had English and Russian half lives: Although Russian was his native language, he grew up almost equally at home in English and, like Mirsky, produced much of his best work in English. To the general reading public in the United States, Nabokov is best known for his Lolita, a quite scandalous novel for the America of the 1950s. But literature specialists generally, and Slavicists in particular, remember him for such things as a small book on Nikolay Gogol which he published in 1944, not so very long after he arrived in this country, and especially for his monumental four-volume edition of Eugene Onegin (1964), including particularly his two volumes of superb Nabokovian notes. As a scholar of Russian and world literature he was idiosyncratic, frequently irritating, and sometimes ludicrously wrong (he proclaimed Dostoyevsky a "much overrated, sentimental, and gothic novelist of the time," as if he were largely forgotten by now). But as a scholar, also, he was always stimulating, never boring.

I myself cannot say the same for his fiction. To be sure, Nabokov has many admirers in Western academic circles, who relish the cultural and linguistic riddles he sets in his fictional texts. Nowadays, with the healing of the rift between Russian emigre and Soviet Russian literature (which he himself personified so strikingly), Nabokov's writings are appearing in large editions in his native Russia. Reportedly, readers nearly come to blows in Moscow bookstores over copies of his work. And yet there have always been those-and I count myself among them- who find his fiction indigestible. In 1947 the critic Diana Trilling said of his Bend Sinister: "Mr. Nabokov's novel is written in a claustrophobic style in which the reader's mind is allowed to do no work of its own and which leads us by meaningless associations into blind alleys where it traps us in boredom."

Here Trilling defines a central defect of Nabokov as fiction writer.

Boyd gives no indication in this volume that he is familiar with Trilling's view; yet, though he remains an admirer, one cannot help noticing that he arrives at negative assessments of a surprisingly large portion of Nabokov's fictional works, and sometimes drops remarks indicating that his reactions rather resemble hers. For example, in speaking of The Gift, which he considers Nabokov's finest and pivotal work, Boyd pays particular attention to its initial sentence, which he admits is labyrinthine but also considers lucid. Perhaps it is in this instance, but the labyrinthine generally tends toward opacity. And at another point Boyd offers a formulation that sounds very much like Trilling's: "Nabokov often engulfs us in the consciousness of a character and lets us out only after we have lost our bearings." But since there is a symbiosis between biographer and subject in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, there is also a parallel between the strengths and weaknesses of the two men's writing, as I shall argue below.

The background

Before we attempt this argument, however, let us consider what Boyd hoped to accomplish through his book. He writes that "this has never been an official or authorized biography" but admits that he has been on good terms with Nabokov's widow, Vera, and his son, Dmitri, who have granted him full access to the writer's archive and to their recollections of him. In return, Boyd gave them the right to review his text before publication and to discuss it with him. He says this has "never impinged a jot on my freedom to write what I construe the evidence requires," and the witness of the book itself makes this claim appear quite accurate. But it is also true that the final product bears something resembling the imprimatur of the Nabokov family, who have always been protective of Nabokov's reputation.

There is also the question of the biography's size, which to a degree determines its nature. Boyd first met Vera Nabokov in 1979, some two years after Nabokov's death, and a short time later was invited to use the Nabokov archives. In 1981 he undertook serious work on the biography. Boyd initially conceived of it as a single-volume work but soon realized it would have to extend to at least two volumes, the first dealing with Nabokov's Russian half life, the second with his career in the English-speaking world, primarily in the United States.

At that stage the commercial publishing house (Simon & Schuster) to which he was committed began to worry, and Boyd transferred his project to the Princeton University Press, whose literary editor is a man of discernment. The Press has already undertaken such things as Joseph Frank's magnificent biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose three volumes thus far reach only to 1865 and which will probably require at least another three volumes to complete. Princeton is willing to risk lengthy biographies, and its Nabokovian gamble has paid off, for the book has attracted much favorable attention and sales have been excellent thus far.

Boyd opens his study of Nabokov's Russian years with a chapter on the distinguished Nabokov family background before taking up his subject proper with Vladimir Nabokov's birth in 1899--exactly a century after Pushkin's birth--in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Nabokov's father was a remarkable intellectual and political figure, a leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party during the first session of the Russian parliament, or Duma, in 1906, and editor of his party's newspaper. A man of great personal courage, he fell victim to an assassin's bullets in 1922, in German exile, while defending the life of a political rival. Nabokov always revered his father, both in life and in death. From him he received not only his personal wealth at the start of his career but his aristocratic lineage and his sense of noblesse oblige; nevertheless, he steadfastly declined to follow his father's lead in acting as a public political figure. Nabokov wished to remain an intellectual, a literary man who took public positions solely through his writing.

Educated at the first-rate Tenishev School in St. Petersburg, Nabokov began his literary career primarily as a poet: During the revolutionary summer of 1917 he spent much of his time writing verse. When his family removed to the Crimea in 1917, beginning the pilgrimage that would end in emigration, Vladimir went along; for much of his life he would be cast about by the political waves of his time, but he would not even attempt to direct them in any sense.

After numerous vicissitudes the Nabokov family arrived in Berlin, which would remain Vladimir's home for most of the years prior to his emigration to America. From 1919 to 1922 he was a student at Cambridge, where he perfected his English even further upon the foundation provided by his governesses (in Germany he deliberately avoided learning German well, for fear it would contaminate his Russian) and began to write under the pseudonym of Sirin, by which name he would be known for the entire Russian emigre period.

In 1925 he married Vera Slonim and settled down to support his family through literary work in the large Russian emigre community that Berlin sheltered at the time. Nabokov worked in all possible forms, including verse: For example, 1926 saw the composition of "University Poem," a tribute by inverted imitation to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, of which the future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin thought highly. There were short stories too, and especially novels. One of his finest early novels was The Defense, a book based on chess: Nabokov was an enthusiastic designer and solver of chess problems.

Nabokov's Gift

But his literary and intellectual career was not an existence calculated to provide a good living, especially since most of his writing remained untranslated from Russian and so was accessible only to the Russian emigre communities of Europe. Consequently he and his family lived in modest rented rooms in various parts of Berlin, and he often enough wondered where his next meal might come from, especially after his only child, Dmitri, was born in 1934. Moreover, after 1933 there was the worsening political situation in Germany to consider, for Vera Nabokov was of Jewish extraction.

And still, it was precisely then that Nabokov chose to set aside the several years necessary for the completion of his best novel, The Gift. Boyd summarizes its plot, very economically, as follows:

Its main story covers three years (1926-1929) in [the hero] Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's life as a young emigre in Berlin: the rapid expansion of his literary gift, from an unnoticed volume of delicate reminiscent verse to a flamboyant and savagely outspoken biography of a revered historical figure and finally to the very idea for The Gift itself. As the book gradually discloses, it has also been from its first page odor's tender thank-you to fate for the gift of Zina Mertz, the woman he will marry.

A side from being thus a convolutedly autobiographical work, and in addition the source of much of Nabokov's fiction yet to come ("almost all of Nabokov's major artistic projects for thirty years can trace their origins back to The Gift," Boyd writes), the book also points forward to Nabokov's future scholarly accomplishments. For the most famous chapter in The Gift is precisely a biography, that of Nikolay Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), a literary theoretician and radical social critic who suffered arrest and exile for his beliefs and came to be utterly revered by the Russian intelligentsia, including most of those in the anti-Bolshevik emigration.

Nabokov, with characteristic independence of mind, regarded Chernyshevsky's intellectual influence as wholly pernicious. After collecting a great deal of historical material, Nabokov fashioned a biography that emphasized what a curious, even pathetic, personality his was. Only a special sort of person would compile, as Chernyshevsky did, a "Diary of My Relations with Her Who Comprises My Happiness," in which he drafted his marriage proposal to his future wife, systematically listed arguments both for and against the marriage, and calculated with great precision what it would cost him to live in a newly married state. Most people interested in the history of nineteenth-century Russian literature find Nabokov's biography of Chernyshevsky quite fascinating; anyone who makes the acquaintance of Nabokov's Chernyshevsky cannot perceive him in the same way he did previously.

The editors of the leading Russian emigre literary magazine, in which Nabokov had published regularly up to that time, refused outright to publish the Chernyshevsky chapter, and so the novel first appeared without it. The entire episode was an object lesson in intellectual tolerance and freedom of speech, and it is no accident that it should have been linked to a biography.

By the time The Gift appeared, the Berlin political situation had become too difficult for the Nabokovs; and in 1938 they left for Paris, another great center of the Russian emigration. But the war clouds were gathering, and Nabokov realized it would be preferable to leave Europe altogether. Thus when he received a definite invitation to teach a summer course in Russian literature at Stanford University in the summer of 1940 (fifty years later it is difficult for us to realize how few and far between such courses then were), Nabokov seized the opportunity. He and his family took ship for the United States in May 1940. The Russian years were over; the American years--which would bring him fame and fortune--were about to begin. But that half life remains for the second volume of Boyd's biography.

What is biography?

Leon Edel, himself the author of a multivolume biography of Henry James and also of a stimulating essay on the theory of biography, holds that "the biographer truly succeeds if a distinct literary form can be found for the particular life." A literary form implies a pattern of meaning to be discerned by the biographer within the history of an individual life. Life itself is logically prior to an understanding of life, but life can be fully appreciated only when it is invested with meaning through the selection and arrangement of episodes and facts within the framework of a literary text. Moreover, the length of a biography can affect its nature: It is easier to discern a few striking patterns in a short biography than in a long one, when biographical patterns are more numerous and more subtly intertwined.

Nabokov himself was, in Boyd's words, "generally hostile to literary biography," although he did allow an exception for Pushkin, since Pushkin furnished (to quote Nabokov now) "a singular case of a man's outer life fusing so organically with his inner one, that the story of his actual existence seems a masterpiece of his own pen...." Since most other literary men could not meet that standard, Nabokov believed that writers' works should be left to stand for the writers' lives.

On the other hand, Nabokov took no serious steps to thwart future biographers, as did, say, Henry James, who deliberately burned quantities of his correspondence. Nabokov maintained an extensive archive, which Boyd has used freely. We have also seen that Nabokov indulged in literary biography himself (though embedded in a fictional work) and developed a biographical pattern of his subject (Chernyshevsky) that presented him in a rather negative light. Even more important is the fact that one of Nabokov's finest later works was the autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory, through which he reconstituted the memories and emotions of his long-departed childhood and youth in Russia. Boyd draws heavily upon Speak, Memory for his book's early chapters, although he does not invariably distinguish sufficiently between what the young Vladimir might actually have thought at the time and what the mature writer believed he thought decades later (nineteenth-century Russian memoir writers constantly quote "verbatim" extensive dialogues of years earlier which they could not possibly recall accurately, and scholars trustingly reproduce their "reminiscences").

Nabokov also had an earlier biographer, Andrew Field, with whom he dealt directly and then quarrelled violently, as he did with anyone he considered mistaken or wrong, and most especially scholars who wrote inaccurately about his own work. Nabokov was an eager and powerful polemicist, and it was best not to cross him while he was still around to defend himself. Boyd carries on the quarrel with Field in the notes to this biography (at one point he denounces a characterization by Field as "sheer bluster"), but he does not become obsessed with that old dispute.

Nabokov could, of course, hold stubbornly to his theories: His view that Eugene Onegin could not possibly be translated into English verse, but only prose, lay at the root of his dispute with Edmund Wilson. But he did not cling to his theoretical dislike for literary biography in the same manner.

When Boyd undertook his project, he might have chosen to write pure biography and to pay only minimal attention to the analysis of Nabokov's writings. He decided instead to write a biography interspersed with lengthy discussions of Nabokov's works inserted at the appropriate chronological points in his life. The book thus emerges as a perfectly legitimate hybrid, a cross between biography and literary criticism and a work of considerable length.

Pitfalls Of Literary Biography

The biographer of a literary figure- as opposed to individuals whose profession is not the written word, for example, statesmen, military men, or businessmen-faces the difficulty that since his final product is a literary one, his linguistically overwhelming subject may influence him substantially if unconsciously. Something of the sort seems to have happened to Boyd: The pattern of Nabokov's intellectual strengths is imposed upon his biographer--for the biographical segments of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years form an excellent piece of work, a first-rate half- life.

Boyd approaches his topic without preconceived opinions or theories. He follows his evidence where it leads him. Clearly, he admires Nabokov, and probably would have gotten on well with him had he known him in real life, but his liking does not blind him to his subject's weaknesses. He does not concoct thoughts for his subject's head when he lacks reliable evidence of what those thoughts might have been. When there is little source material, as is the case for many of Nabokov's Berlin years, Boyd admits the fact and does not strain to make things up out of whole cloth. Boyd provides balanced, judicious and accurate assessments of the political and cultural situations in which Nabokov found himself at various points in his life. Generally speaking he displays a good sense of what is worth writing about, although sometimes he indulges in excessive detail: For example, in describing a family move in Berlin of 1929 he writes an entire paragraph on their rooms and on the several locations at which the Nabokovs had already lived in Berlin, which provides more information than most readers need. Boyd also traces the penetration of biographical facts from Nabokov's life into his fiction, although sometimes one suspects he compiled a card file of facts from Nabokov's fiction and rather mechanically inserted them into the biography at appropriate places.

But if Boyd is eminently successful as biographer of Nabokov the man in this volume, in my view, he falls short as literary critic and historian. Like Nabokov's fiction itself, Boyd's discussions of Nabokov's fiction are convoluted, repetitive, and ultimately dull; the same is true of a long chapter he devotes to a discussion of Nabokov's literary ideas. In his equally detailed biography of Dostoevsky, Joseph Frank skillfully dovetails his discussions of individual works into the literary, historical, and biographical narration of the book. Boyd is more consciously "literary critical," more academic in the bad sense of the word.

While he was composing King, Queen, Knave, Nabokov wrote his mother that he was engrossed in a "mole-like existence ... sweating, sweating over my novel until my head spins." A statement of this sort points to the artificial, cerebral quality of Nabokov's artistic prose, to which Boyd seems to look as the model for his literary criticism. Ironically, Nabokov's own literary scholarship-his books on The Song of Igor's Campaign, Gogol, Eugene Onegin, his posthumously published lectures on Russian literature was sensible, down-to-earth, factual, and interesting. If Boyd were to take Nabokov's own critical writing as the model for his discussion of Nabokov's fiction, the second half life might turn out to be a whole book: not just a masterpiece of purely biographical writing but an illuminating series of critical analyses as well.