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A sharp, engaging look at the life of Vladimir Nabokov

By Carlin Romano. Carlin Romano is a book critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer

January 12, 2003

Vladimir Nabokov

By Jane Grayson

Overlook, 156 pages

$19.95

Does a writer in exile bear any political or moral duties to his native country and culture? Or is the involuntary literary expat, by force of circumstance, beyond patriotic requirements and conceptions?

This issue dates back to the earliest days of literature's migration across borders. But Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), a quarter-century after his death, presents it in an idiosyncratic form equaled by few writers. His multicountry and multilinguistic life--imposed on him by the pressures of 20th Century history--presents an intuitive aesthete trapped by non-aesthetic realities.
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Born to an aristocratic family in imperial St. Petersburg, driven to Germany and the United States by the Bolshevik Revolution and Nazism, and finally returned by "Lolita" (1958), his succes de scandale, to an apt life as the most distinguished permanent guest in Switzerland's Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov incarnated the dry-witted European cosmopolitan, able to pun in five languages. His career has long attracted serious biographical attention, including Brian Boyd's highly praised two-volume work, and a pair of influential volumes by Andrew Field.

Distilling a sharp, reliable portrait of a writer in the wake of such larger efforts can stymie the most devoted sketch artist. But in "Vladimir Nabokov," Jane Grayson, a leading English Nabokov expert, accomplishes the task of conveying his personal pros and cons while displaying the many worlds in which he flourished. Her handsomely produced volume in the Overlook Illustrated Lives series is very much for the aficionado. Unlike many monographs, it avoids potted summaries of the novels, preferring to devote its limited space to the life.

Grayson shows that Nabokov negotiated politics without politicizing his literary vision. In his early years, he once joked, he was just "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library." At 17, he inherited "a mansion, an estate, and a fortune from his uncle."

But three years later, in 1919, his father's liberal political activity forced the family to flee the Russian Revolution for the Crimea, Athens and Berlin. (Extremists then assassinated his father in 1922.) From 1919 to 1940, Nabokov lived in Germany and France and earned a reputation as one of the finest talents in Russian emigre literature.

Some of the qualities remarked in him as a young man surfaced strongly in his writing. Grayson describes young Nabokov as "self-assured, boisterous, sporty," and quotes an early teacher: " `I don't like him, he's a lo! ner.' " Others thought him a linguistic showoff.

In the early fiction, Grayson comments, "Nabokov takes his artistic revenge on the events that destroyed the stability of his world by employing mockery and distance. . . . In his autobiography, the artfulness lies in relegating politics to the wings of the action." Nabokov drove the point home directly in a 1937 Paris lecture, declaring that the artist's duty is to remain aloof from tragic events "even if the clamor of the times, the cries of the murdered victims and the growling of the brute tyrant reach his ears."

In both his European and American periods, Nabokov fiercely clung to Russia not through politics or a determination to return (he never did), but through its language. The nom de plume of "Sirin" that he employed in his European period--a bird of paradise in Russian folklore--emphasized his fabulist conception of the Russian past.

Nabokov evolves in Grayson's tale--marrying his fellow Petersbu! rger Vera Slonim, who became his lifelong partner; begging for a job as a low-ranking Russian teacher in the United States; finally rising to celebrated American author--yet remains a word artist, first and foremost. Deploying luxurious clauses, a pun-happy English bent "slightly to a foreigner's ear," and an abiding attraction to the fantastic and experimental, he escaped to a rarefied life much like the one with which he began, sweetened by such elite hobbies as collecting and studying butterflies.

To the end, Grayson notes, he stayed resolutely "anti-herd," with an "aversion to ideology" and a contempt for perceived artistic mediocrity. That last attitude prompted one of his least becoming moments: condescension to the far braver Boris Pasternak and his novel "Doctor Zhivago." Nabokov privately dismissed the Nobel laureate's book as trashy and melodramatic.

As a professor, Nabokov instructed students that great novels are "fairy tales," that a great writer i! s "not a teacher or moralist or social historian, but an enchanter."

Nabokov achieved that status, Grayson judges, by always "exploring borderlines--between reality and fantasy, sense and nonsense, sanity and madness, love and lust, the cosmic and the comic."

Only the borderline between literature and political commitment, it seems, proved uncrossable.

Chicago Tribune