Reading Nabokov Whole

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov's startling brilliance as an author has frequently been captured in the image of a conjurer. In this constellation, Nabokov is a writer capable of pulling intricate thematic and verbal rabbits out of textual hats and of magically turning the limpid water of his prose into the headiest of poetic wines. As an object of critical inquiry, however, a perhaps more fitting metaphor for Nabokov is that of the escape artist. Throughout the course of twentieth-century letters in the two linguistic traditions he so decisively influenced, criticism was never able conclusively to fix and detain Nabokov within the conventions of any school or style other than of his own inimitable creation. The history of Nabokov's reception in both Russia and the West is a history of Nabokov's apprehension by, and inevitable elusion of, the warders of a series of schools-cum-prisons of criticism. Since the opening decades of the twentieth-century, Nabokov's writing has repeatedly picked the locks and sprung the chains of a string of critical isms, from realism to deconstructionism and beyond.Complicating this history of critical reception-and in inadvertent parody of Nabokov's own thematic interest in the figure of the double-is the bifurcation of one of the most thematically and stylistically integrated oeuvres in literature into two separate literary traditions. Until recently, critical understanding of Nabokov in both Russian and Anglo-American letters followed parallel courses of development as a result of a primarily linguistically motivated partition. ' First in the European emigre community and then again in America, Nabokov was compelled to wrestle recognition for his artistry by dint of brilliance and persistent achievement in the face of, at times, bitter resistance. Thus, in both traditions, Nabokov's writing has been the subject of marvelled admiration but also the occasional suspicion of deep-seated foreignness. In two well-known examples of assessment from opposing ends of his career, for instance, Nabokov the Russian author of King, Queen, Knave and The Defense was accused of unRussianness (nerusskost') by fellow emigre critics while the much respected American author ofLolita nonetheless remained for some something of a black swan due to both his aesthetic brilliance and strong opinions. These are but particular examples in illustration of the challenge Nabokov's protean oeuvre has presented to criticism-a challenge which is not reduced in the move from the localized and ultimately secondary issue of Nabokov's national belonging to consideration of the shape and character of his writing as a whole.In Russian literature, the precociously talented writer Sirin, with his uncompromising allegiance to the directives of his own youthful talent, seemed at the beginning of his career an affront to an older generation of emigre readers and critics desperate to maintain the vestiges of Russia's literary tradition in the face of the ravages of Soviet developments and the deprivations of exile. Despite initial reservations, however, even before the demise of Western Europe's Russian emigre community and his departure for America and metamorphosis into an English-language writer, Nabokov was recognized as one of the greatest writers of Russian literature in exile. Already in 1930, Gleb Struve, one of the most authoritative critics of emigre Russian culture, could term Nabokov [. . . ] emigre Russia's greatest gift to Russian literature. Indeed, in the context of Soviet Russian literature's disastrous careening away from the trajectory set by the nineteenth-century tradition into socialist realism and Nabokov's simultaneous efforts to preserve the best of Russian literature as a portion of his own literary project, Struve's comments took on a prophetic quality in dimensions he could scarcely have anticipated. In both his fiction-in The Gift, for instance, which foregrounds Russian literature as the novel's heroine-and in his translations and critical writing-from translations of Lermontov, Tiutchev and Pushkin to studies of Khodasevich, The Song of Igor's Campaign, Gogol' and others-Nabokov mediated and represented the still potent essence of Russia's dormant cultural tradition. …