The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father by Gavriel Shapiro Nabokov, Vladimir Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 737 Shapiro, Gavriel. The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2014. xvii + 306 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Nabokov, Vladimir. Letters to Véra. Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books, London and New York, 2014. lxi + 798 pp. Illustrations. Chronology. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £30.00: $40.00. 2014 saw the publication of two long-anticipated volumes, each focusing on the most intimate and significant relationships in Nabokov’s life. The first, Gavriel Shapiro’s study of V. D. Nabokov’s influence on his son, casts invaluable light on the predominant figure of Nabokov’s formative years, and the second, a collection of newly-published letters from Nabokov to his wife, Véra, offers a rare first-hand account of his day-to-day existence over the course of more than half a century. Perhaps the most enduring image of Nabokov and his father is that of them on a boat attempting to play a makeshift game of chess to the rattle of Bolshevik machine-gun fire as they sailed out of Sebastopol harbour in 1919. Yet, as Shapiro points out, ‘the fundamental and multifaceted role of V. D. Nabokov in the life and works of his illustrious son’ has until now been ‘largely overlooked’ (p. 5). The purpose of his study, therefore, is to draw the focus onto someone who, apart from being a major source of inspiration for his eldest son, was in his own right fascinating and dynamic, a kind of late imperial Russian Renaissance Man. Shapiro’s book is structured around a defined set of topics and sub-topics — jurisprudence; politics; literature; painting, theatre and music; lepidoptera, chess and sports — which enable him to explore the many correspondences, affinities and allusions that emerge either from Nabokov’s writing, or through a careful comparison of character, behaviour and public persona communicated via his essays, commentaries and interviews. To Nabokov scholars, much of this material will be eminently familiar: descriptions of V. D. Nabokov in his various guises — as a jurist, politician and nobleman, avid chess player, boxing enthusiast, eclectic book collector and sponsor of the arts — are scattered throughout Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, and further elaborated not least in Brian Boyd’s magisterial biographical work. What is distinct about thisstudy,apartfromthewealthofnewinformationonV.D.Nabokovitprovides (which includes translations of two key essays in the volume’s Appendices), is the way Shapiro teases out the range of references Nabokov made to his father consistently across his work. One such example is Prison Pastimes, V. D.’s account of his three-month incarceration in 1908, which informs Nabokov’s 1938 novel, Invitation to a Beheading, evident in Cincinnatus’s experiences of SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 738 solitary confinement, surveillance and the humiliation of infantilization, as well as the novel’s identifiable variant of the Kresty prison library. Through Shapiro’s careful attention — drawing on V. D. Nabokov’s prolific published work as a criminologist, political commentator and critic of the arts, as well as unpublished diaries and notes — what was a partial yet intriguing figure finally steps out of the shadows to assume fully three dimensions. For example, whilst his exploits as a political campaigner and defender of civil rights are well documented, the controversy of his attendance and reporting of the Beilis Trial during 1913 is revealing of the risks he took to declare his abhorrence of antisemitism, something that his son not only shared but which also made him a target for attack by the Russian right wing in émigré Berlin. It was a theme that recurs throughout Nabokov’s fiction, from The Defense (1929) to the postHolocaust story, ‘A Conversation Piece’ (1945), culminating in his portrayal of Pnin’s lost love, Mira Belochkin, who perishes in a Nazi concentration camp. As well as many congruences of opinion and taste between father and son, there were also divergences. For example, whilst both expressed a negative attitude towards Oscar Wilde, it is apparent from Nabokov’s statements on art and artistry that Wilde’s ‘aesthetic precepts’ had a ‘certain impact’ on him, and he...