Artist in Exile: The Americanization of Humbert Humbert

Abstract

am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England where I studied French literature, before spending fifteen years in Germany.' Thus Vladimir Nabokov described the circuitous process, begun twenty-four years earlier, of evolving a new American identity and adapting it to his European past. Readers of Lolita (1955) have long noted a comparable effort of assimilation in the creation of his only American' novel and of its emigre protagonist, Humbert Humbert. Despite his persistent disclaimer that There is nothing autobiographic in Lolita,2 Nabokov's critics have repeatedly stressed the many striking affinities between Humbert's uneasy life in Ramsdale and Beardsley and his creator's early emigre years in the northeastern United States.3 It has often been observed that Humbert's fervid desire for the eternal nymphet is similar to, if not actually derived from, the many quests for some imperishable ideal embodied in Poe and Hawthorne and, indeed, in much subsequent American fiction.4 Humbert's energetic pursuit of his ultraviolet darling' across the American dreamscape has also received pointed attention, and, of course, Nabokov's own Homeric attempts to master the poshlost and dreary Philistinism of middle-class American life have become all but legendary in our time.5 Questions spring to mind when so overt an appeal is made to American themes and sources. In what ways may Lolita be expressive not only of Nabokov's perennial concerns (namely, art and the aesthetic imagination) but of a new and pressing interest in securing an American identity? What does that vague term American Novel mean after all, and of what use is it when applied to the work of a writer so conspicuously international in outlook? In light of Nabokov's concerted attempt to reclaim America for his