Revisions

By R.Z. Sheppard

This is Andrew Field's third crack at the literary and biographical puzzle that was Vladimir Nabokov. The first, Nabokov: His Life in Art (1967), demonstrated the scholar's grasp of the great man's novels, stories and poems. It was a valuable guide through an intimidating maze of themes and plots; its thoroughness made it a high form of flattery. Field's credo, that a writer's "truest and most palpable biography" is his work, rang with disarming idealism. Nabokov must have been impressed and relieved; his disdain for the genre he defined as "psychoplagiarism" was well known. The acolyte was invited to the author's home in Montreux, Switzerland, where he took the inside track in Nabokovian studies and conducted the interviews that led to book No. 2, Nabokov: His Life in Part (1977).

It would appear there was more to a writer than his art. Field dutifully charted the course of Nabokov's life: his birth into a distinguished St. Petersburg family; his idyllic, multilingual youth; the Bolshevik Revolution, which stripped the clan of rank and property and launched it into exile. There were Nabokov's university years at Cambridge; his ascension as "Sirin," the pseudonymous literary star of the Russian emigre communities of Berlin and Paris; the coming of World War II; and the flight to America with Wife Vera and Son Dmitri. Colorful details from this period include Nabokov's career as a teacher at Wellesley and Cornell, his cross-country butterfly hunts, his friendship and falling-out with Edmund Wilson and the sensational success of Lolita, which freed Nabokov from the academy and allowed him to live in an old-style luxury hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva.

In retelling this story, Field frequently borrows verbatim from his earlier book. But there are some intriguing additions. His research since Nabokov's death in 1977 has enriched the European period between the wars and provided some naughty parts. The novelist's great-grandmother Nina von Korf continued a love affair with Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's grandfather, after he became her son-in-law. This, according to Field, accounts for the theme of incest in books like Ada and Lolita, a reversal of family history in which "the man marries the daughter in order to be able to continue more easily to be her mother's lover." As a gossip, Field has it both ways. Nabokov's grandmother Maria and Alexander II "must have been fleeting lovers." In one breath, this relationship could mean that the novelist's father was the Czar's bastard son. In the next gasp, the possibility is dismissed on the ground that Alexander had another mistress at the time. There is solid evidence that Nabokov was a randy young adult and had at least one serious extramarital entanglement. There is also the assertion that he was a spiritualist who believed in communication between the living and the dead.

If so, Field can expect some latenight calls. For VN is not only a revision of His Life in Part but a revisionist view of the man and much of his art. The literary icon Field once cryptically defined as a "Russian-American writer of our time and of his own reality" is now called a "great Russian-American Narcissus." Late novels such as Ada and Look at the Harlequins! are seen as works of a "garden-variety egotist." Both books have their share of self-indulgence and preening; neither approaches the level of masterpieces like Lolita and Pale Fire, the last word on the mad pursuit of biographical reality. But viewed against the body of Nabokov's fiction, the narcissist label seems inadequate, a bit trendy and more than a little disingenuous. Field made his name studying the work and the man. Better than most outsiders, he knows the sources of Nabokov's genius, his gifts for showmanship and parody, his eccentricities and vanities. To discover at this late date that his hero was not Mother Teresa seems peculiar. --By R.Z. Sheppard