Vladimir Nabokov: 1899-1977

By R. Z. Sheppard

Vladimir Nabokov was, in his own words, "an American writer born in Russia and educated in England, where I studied French literature before spending 15 years in Germany." His life was, in fact, a spiral of migrations, and his passport was his art. When he died last week at 78, of a viral infection, at a hospital near his home in Montreux, Switzerland, that art was widely considered to include some of the best novels of the 20th century. There are three masterpieces: The Gift, written in Russian and first published in 1936, Lolita (1955), and Pale Fire (1962). In addition to 14 other novels, hundreds of poems, dozens of short stories, dramas, translations, criticism and scientific articles about butterflies, Nabokov produced one of the finest autobiographies in the English language. First published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence, the book was expanded and reissued in 1966 as Speak, Memory.

At the Montreux Palace hotel, where he and his wife Vera occupied apartments for the past 18 years, Nabokov wrote, composed chess problems and pondered the secrets of entomology --often while seated on garden benches. Out of his deep knowledge of language and literature, he designed a fictive looking-glass world whose seriousness was lightened by ingenious wordplay and metaphors. He was a sturdy, athletic figure who in summer could be seen chasing butterflies in Alpine meadows.

In an age of narrow specializations, Nabokov's genius was being able to see that "there is no science without fancy, and no art without facts." To his naturalist's eye, the world contained a profusion of odd juxtapositions, camouflages and artifices that concealed enchanting truths. A journalist who asked why the genitalia of male butterflies were hooked and serrated like instruments of torture received the following two-word answer: "High winds."

Magical Memories. In nature, beauty is the beast. This is also true in much of Nabokov's fiction. The delectable nymphet Lolita has a cruel, popsicle heart. The exquisite sensibilities of her middle-aged lover Humbert Humbert are grotesquely twisted by lust. Charles Kinbote, whose magical memories feed Pale Fire, is hopelessly mad, as is Luzhin, the chessmaster in The Defense.

With his characteristic self-parodying wit, Nabokov once said: "I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better-balanced mad mind than mine." It was the mind of an exile imprisoned in memories of a culture swept away by revolution and war. Born April 23, 1899, into an intellectual, upper-class St. Petersburg family, Nabokov enjoyed the benefits of wealth, position and a Western European education. English was his first language, taught by an English nanny. French and Russian were learned, as he said, "at my nurses' knees--two nurses, four knees." His mother encouraged his early poetic efforts, and his father, a distinguished liberal jurist during the final reactionary years of imperial Russia, set an example of scholarship and courage.

The Nabokovs fled from the Bolsheviks in 1919 and eventually settled in Berlin, where thousands of other White Russians established a culture in exile.

For Vladimir, the loss went far deeper than confiscated rubles and country estates. As a budding Russian poet, he was deprived of the roots of his language.

This sense of linguistic homelessness is evident throughout his work, but most poignant in the poem "An Evening of Russian Poetry" ("Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,/ I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns").

In 1925 Nabokov married Vera Slonim, daughter of a Jewish industrialist from St. Petersburg who had also fled the revolution. A son, Dmitri, now an opera singer in Europe, was born in 1934. Five years later, the family sailed for the U.S., where Nabokov soon be gan to feel "as American as April in Arizona." He taught at Wellesley and Cor nell, studied butterflies at Harvard, and published stories in such magazines as Esquire and The New Yorker. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947) earned high praise but few royalties. With the American edition of Lolita in 1958, Nabokov be came an unpronounceable household name.* It now seems incredible that only a generation ago a sexually unexplicit novel about a middle-aged man and a pubescent girl caused a national scandal. Yet the notoriety put the book on the bestseller list and Nabokov on the road to financial independence.

Scimitars of Anger. A famous and acclaimed Nabokov was stylistically careful but never shy about expressing his views on the modern world that up rooted him. From Switzerland, where he moved in 1959, he flashed scimitars of anger and loosed heavy-hearted outrage at crudities, vulgar sentimentality and artistic pretensions that he lumped un der the termposhlost. The word, Russian for a kind of middle-class tackiness, applied not only to the shibboleths and dashboard saints of popular culture but also to the works of Sigmund Freud -- which he saw as an internal totalitarianism -- and to the poetry of Ezra Pound, whom he called "that total fake."

Politically, Nabokov saw himself as an old-fashioned liberal, though by current standards he was a William F. Buckley conservative. His suggestion that the portrait of a head of government "should not exceed a postage stamp in size" makes good sense in any ideology.

Nabokov crossed too many borders to have been a winner in the geopolitics of the Nobel Prize. Yet he gave a prize greater than any he might have received: his challenging, intricate fiction, which miraculously demonstrates that art is not a mirror held up to na ture, but rather a prism that refracts blinding reality into rainbows of wisdom and feeling.

* The correct pronunciation is Nahfoakoff.

R.Z. Sheppard

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