If Nabokov was, as he often claimed, a God in his fictional universes, and his loyal readers were, as he sometimes called them, little Nabokovs, then the posthumous Nabokov has produced a very jealous bunch of little Gods. How they hate one another! The poststructuralists sneer at the befuddled early reviewers; his second biographer takes every possible opportunity to denigrate his first; the Nabokov Estate wages a campaign of intellectual terror against all would-be heretics; and everyone seems to loathe Edmund Wilson. Nabokov has many admirers, the admiring Martin Amis once grumbled, but they are "the wrong kind of admirers." It's true. Personally, I have a problem with the French.

You know who I mean--the aesthetes, the punsters, the turtlenecked acolytes of reading-as-wanking and literature as play. Nabokov is their favorite writer, the convenient novelistic illustration of their theoretical axioms. For all the swipes he took at the various hermeneutic rackets of the American academy--Pale Fire, for one--he eventually became, as Gore Vidal put it way back in 1973, "just the sort of writer the racketeers like to teach."

Nabokov played right into their hands, of course, with the obsessive lepidopterism, the inveterate snobbery, the photo caption in Speak, Memory that actually takes the trouble to point out the "half-empty package of Gauloises cigarettes . . . between the ink bottle and the overful ashtray." And his puns, his games, all those doubles doubling and artifices multiplying--he is as perfectly suited to the poststructuralist "play of signs" as T. S. Eliot's dense poetry was to the New Critics' close reading, and perhaps as much of a culture hero, in certain narrowing circles, as we've had since Eliot himself. It was as if Nabokov had glimpsed the legions of Barthesans (rhymes with partisans) coming around some queerly straightened bend in time, and liked what he saw.

But. There is a short letter Nabokov sent to Solzhenitsyn shortly after the dissident writer was finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. "I was happy to learn today of your passage to the free world from our dreadful homeland," wrote Nabokov:

I am happy as well that your children will be attending schools for humans, not for slaves.

. . . I doubt if even you have read [the] poems, articles, stories [and] novels . . . in which, ever since the vile times of Lenin, I have not ceased to mock the philistinism of Sovietized Russia and to thunder against the very kind of vicious cruelty of which you write and of which you will now write freely.

The newspapers cannot decide in which country you will settle; but if you should happen to visit Switzerland, let me know and we shall get together.

I never make official "political" statements. Privately, though, I could not refrain from welcoming you.

This is easily recognizable, classic Nabokov--the formulaic contempt for "philistinism," the proud disdain for "official" politics-- only the "thunder" gives one pause. Now, Solzhenitsyn: Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned, threatened, his manuscripts seized and himself finally deported, all the while attempting to bring down a dictatorship. He flung his defiance and the three volumes of Gulag Archipelago into their leering mugs. Solzhenitsyn, we can reasonably assent to Nabokov's formulation, thundered against vicious cruelty. But in what way did Nabokov thunder?

Mostly he seemed to thunder against other people's thundering. In interviews, lectures, and a series of prefaces to the American translations of his Russian novels, he declared again and again his scorn for the "topical trash" that was the (supposedly progressive) Literature of Ideas. "I composed the Russian original [of Invitation to a Beheading] some fifteen years after escaping from the Bolshevist regime and just before the Nazi regime reached its full volume of welcome," he yawned. "The question whether or not my seeing both in terms of one dull beastly farce had any effect on this book, should concern the good reader as little as it does me." In an early version of what now arrives in the form of neoconservative broadsides against political correctness, he went so far as to equate the pressure of nineteenth-century progressive criticism with the censorship of the Tsars. "Government and revolution," he wrote, "the Tsar! and the Radicals, were both philistines in art." And philistines he didn't like.

In fact, philistinism--or its less cumbersome and richer Russian equivalent, poshlost--is the central term in Nabokov's critical vocabulary. It was a word the enthusiasm for which was undampened by repetition. But the energy Nabokov devoted to discerning and then speculating upon the qualities of people and books he despised was not merely spent to keep his nose out of joint. "To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something," he explained, "is not only an esthetic judgment but also a moral indictment." It is, furthermore, an indictment applicable even to empires: the Soviet Union, writes Nabokov, "a country of moral imbeciles, of smiling slaves and poker faced bullies, has stopped noticing poshlism."

A thundering Nabokov is just the Nabokov we need, and the tirades against poshlism--those are the thunder. Which helps to explain, as well, some of Nabokov's more difficult narrative moves, the same ones capable of producing the impression that, though he writes a dense, high-pitched prose, Nabokov is somehow cold and aloof. One of the most interesting tricks in this regard is the misdirected affection, a ploy we find time and again in the work. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's lovely first novel in English, Sebastian takes a long journey to the village where his mother died. He stays in her hotel, imagines what she saw and thought on her last days on earth: "I felt sure," he writes, "that there had been before her eyes that same bed of purple pansies." Later, he learns that not only has he been in the wrong hotel, but in the wrong village entirely. In Speak, Memory, the only direct mention Nab! okov makes of his father's 1922 assassination occurs in a scene in which the father does not die at all, but has, instead, just narrowly escaped fighting a duel. In Pale Fire, John Shade is assassinated (perhaps) by accident. Lolita relates the tragedy of a monstrously misdirected affection--Humbert Humbert's passion is so overwhelming, no one, much less a not entirely interesting twelve-year-old girl, could possibly hope to reciprocate.

It would be easy enough to read all these instances of disappointed emotion as excessive literary gamesmanship, a spectacular instance of what Trilling called Nabokov's "moral mobility." But that would be to ignore the thunder. Nabokov is thundering here against the imposition of reality onto the significant play of the emotions. He suggests his intention in a typically grandiose pronouncement to his friend and correspondent, Edmund Wilson: "It has never occurred to critics to note that Hamlet does kill the king in the middle of the play; that it turns out to be Polonius does not alter the fact of Hamlet having gone and done it." Nabokov's misdirected affections attempt to dissociate his characters from the objects of their emotions, to grant them autonomy by freeing them from the oppressive cause-and-effect of human relations. And he's right, in a way: for a moment there, thrusting his sword through the arras, Hamlet did experie! nce the killing of the king--though it would perhaps be going too far to suggest that Polonius, after a life of slavish mendacity, died a king's death.

If an attack on narrative conventions is an odd sort of thundering--and it certainly would have seemed odd to Solzhenitsyn--it was one firmly founded on Nabokov's belief in the sanctity and independent meaning of the printed word. To put it swiftly and crudely--and Nabokov's critical judgments are often precisely that--the fundamental fact of Nabokov's life, the "syncopal kick," was his flight from the Bolsheviks in 1919. What we need to understand about his twenty years l'entre deux guerres, when he quite neatly produced all his Russian novels, is that the community for which he wrote, though it was bound by a common hatred for the Bolsheviks and a fractious, shrill, and vibrant cultural life, was not a nation. It lacked the land and the army and the political reality to nurture the causal relationship between word and deed. The Russian emigres controlled no city budgets, named no streets, and culture, especially literatu! re, became the only certain sign of their existence. Simply to write a Russian as uncorrupted by clichИ and as unconcerned with fashionable nineteenth-century Ideas as Nabokov's was to thunder against Bolshevism. Make no mistake: Nabokov maintained a very exalted notion, in moral-political terms, of his profession. He was amazed by literature: "This capacity to wonder at trifles--no matter the imminent peril--these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest form of consciousness." Imminent peril? This is not a man who believes literature to be a version of chess. He was the finest young novelist of the emigration--he was the Whites' Great Hope--and nothing was ever so interesting to him as literature, no other human creation, and certainly not humans themselves, excited his admiration quite so profoundly as did the putting of words to paper.

Like many newly minted Americans, Nabokov worked to reinvent himself upon new shores--but he did not fall upon us from the sky. What should be made clear about his Russian work is that his poetry was straightforwardly lyrical, emphatic, and peculiarly lacking in the sleights and feints we associate with Nabokov--it is not, in short, very interesting poetry. His Russian prose, too, though full of ironic tricks and intricate detail, tilted toward the sentimental. He would claim that his English was "second-rate" compared to his "infinitely docile" Russian (and then admit to some discomfort over this arrogance in his postscript to the Russian translation of Lolita), but this may only prove that infinite docility, a limitless ease, is not what great writing requires. What Nabokov managed in English he could not do in Russian. Of a nostalgic old housekeeper in Speak, Memory, he writes:

She had spent all her life feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul.

Emotion was not enough; detail was not enough. It took the trip not only from poetry to prose but to the prose of another language to uproot all traces of poshlism from his writing, to perform the narrative twists of misdirected affection and open his characters to experience. He was the subtlest thunderer of all.

My dear friends--we must save Nabokov from the French! They are the ones behind the books about Nabokov's butterflies. Behind the articles on mirrors and play. They probably organized last summer's tiresome display of Nabokov ephemera at the New York Public Library, with Nabokov's various pedantic recipes and quips dutifully recorded in our intellectual magazines. They have domesticated his thunder and made it trite. And we'll never really know what he meant by that phrase, incidentally, because Solzhenitsyn was never able to ask him: despite Nabokov's proffered invitation and despite Solzhenitsyn's passing through Switzerland on his way to the States, the two never met. The younger writer contacted Nabokov and suggested a time. Nabokov did not realize that a confirmation was expected. On the appointed day, Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalia approached the Montreaux Palace-Hotel. Nabokov and VИra had requested a table for f! our and were waiting patiently. At the last moment, the Solzhenitsyns lost their nerve, and turned back. Perhaps it was for the best; one finds it difficult to imagine two such disparate temperaments, with such violently differing ideas on the nature of literature, getting along. But one is probably mistaken. And that hour which the Nabokovs spent, certain that the Solzhenitsyns were about to walk through the door--like the night Sebastian Knight spent wondering at the wrong garden--was that not real?

Selected Works by Vladimir Nabokov

Ada, or Ardor. Vintage Books, $16.00.
Bend Sinister. Vintage Books, $14.00.
The Defense. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Despair. Vintage Books, $13.00.
The Eye. Vintage Books, $13.00.
The Gift. Vintage Books, $14.00.
Glory. Vintage Books, $14.00.
Invitation to a Beheading. Vintage Books, $12.00.
King, Queen, Knave. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Laughter in the Dark. New Directions, $11.95.
Lectures on Literature. Harcourt Brace, $16.00.
Lectures on Russian Literature. Harcourt Brace, $15.00.
Lolita. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Look at the Harlequins! Vintage Books, $14.00.
Mary. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Nikolai Gogol. New Directions, $9.95.
Pale Fire. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Pnin. Vintage Books, $11.00.
The Real Life of ! Sebastian Knight. Vintage Books, $13.00.
Speak, Memory. Vintage Books, $14.00.
Strong Opinions. Vintage Books, $15.00.

Keith Gessen left Nabokov's homeland in 1981. He is contributing editor at www.feedmag.com