Review of Reviews: a new study of Nabokov's American years

Of the making of books on Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), one might say, there is no end. The Russian aristocrat who managed to turn out extraordinary work in Russian and English- often doing his own translations; he once wrote he had led the perfectly normal life of a trilingual child in a family with a large library- while making his living as a butterfly collector, is an endlessly fascinating figure. And, truth be told, those who write about him, almost, invariably, can’t resist trying to write like him.

Writing in The Literary Review, Ian Sansom observes,

For all those keen quivering Nabokovians out there with infinitely deep pockets - are there any other kind? - or perhaps with access to a university library, these are undoubtedly the years of plenty. In 2014 alone, even the most casual short-trousered amateur Nabokovterist armed with a basic butterfly net would have been able to catch Maurice Couturier's Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire, Yuri Leving's Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov's Last Novel, Samuel Schuman's Nabokov's Shakespeare, and the paperback reissues of Gerard de Vries and D Barton Johnson's Nabokov and the Art of Painting and Vladimir E Alexandrov's Nabokov's Otherworld.

Almost forty years after his death there is, it seems, much good Nabokov-hunting still to be had. In a lecture on 'The Art of Literature and Commonsense', collected in his Lectures on Literature - which remains the perfect entry point into the vast, prodigious kingdom of the Great Nabob - Nabokov remarks, 'In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth ... and wondering with an immortal Alice at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit ... are the highest form of consciousness.'

So as we go crashing to our death, let us continue, like Alice, to wonder at trifles. This year has already seen a reprint of Galya Diment's excellent and eccentric Pniniad, an utterly thorough study of the relationship between Nabokov and the much-thwarted Marc Szeftel, his colleague at Cornell and the model for poor Timofey Pnin, hapless 'assistant professor emeritus' in Pnin. And now comes Robert Roper's perfectly useful Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita.

Roper’s take- one novelist looks at another- aims to learn the magic alchemy that, in two decades, turned the elegantly turned prose of the Russian aristocrat into what Kingsley Amis called his “Charles Atlas muscle-man' style of writing.”

Sansom’s review concludes Roper does a credible job telling the tale of the man who called himself “as American as Arizona in April,” but wonders, rightly, if we can ever, definitively, reach the wellsprings of such inspiration:

[A]s with almost all literary scholarship, highbrow, lowbrow and everywhere in between - which is no shame to Roper but rather the fault of our own sad sense of loss and estrangement as readers, long exiled from our first literary experiences of passion and joy - reading the book does make one feel rather like Humbert Humbert, struggling to make love to the middle-aged mother of the child he secretly adores. 'So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet's scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.'

Henry Bemis has two works by Nabokov- one from his Russian, and one from his American, periods.  If either strikes your interest- better yet, both, make us an offer!

Here’s what we have in stock:

Glory (McGraw Hill, 1st ed., 1971). ISBN 07-045733-6. First published in Russian in 1932, Nabokov and his son, Dmitri, translated it into English for this edition. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, very good condition. HBB price $50.

Quartet (Phaedra Publications, 1st ed., August 15, 1966).  LOC 66-28101. In a long, January 1966 review in The New Republic, John Appel, Jr. noted, Now in his sixty-seventh year, Vladimir Nabokov is suddenly upon us. Of course, he was here all along, but his oeuvre was like an iceberg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the visible peaks of Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962). In the last eight years, however, six of his books in Russian have been translated and three out of print novels reissued. Nabokov's own translation of Lolita into Russian and a collation of stories known as Nabokov's Quartet appeared quietly this autumn…” These four stories, two published in the U.S. for the first time, show the master in top form. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket, white end papers, boards covered in a rough printed cloth pattern with the author’s signature printed on the lower right front cover. 8.75” x 5.5”, 104 pp. Very good condition. HBB price: $100.