White, Duncan Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 346 avoided in real life’ (p. 194). Yet, Sebastian’s life ‘might [also] reflect the happy but hidden life Sergey had with Hermann’ (p. 194). Given the nature of Nabokov’s writing method, this approach has vast potential for development. Although annotation seems to be the most adequate tool to approach Nabokov’s works, so far very few scholars have adopted it. Only Lolita (Carl R. Proffer, Bloomington, IN, 1968; Alfred Appel Jr., New York, 1970), Pnin (Gennady Barabtarlo, Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), Ada (Brian Boyd, 1993, ongoing project), and now, thanks to de Vries, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (2016), have been annotated. The rest of Nabokov’s oeuvre is still awaiting annotated study. Gerard de Vries’s Silent Love will surely provide a solid platform to springboard future publications on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and inspire further innovative research in Nabokov studies in general. Department of Modern Languages, Literatures Irina Marchesini & Cultures, University of Bologna White, Duncan. Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2017. xiv + 234 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £60.00. Ironically, Duncan White’s study of Nabokov and the literary marketplace appears within a unique marketplace of its own. Situated in the rapidly developing field of studies devoted to one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, any new Nabokov research must be original enough to claim space in the already-tight bookcases filled with scholarly criticism. The book under review is no small achievement and contributes to our understanding of how the extra-literary mechanisms of the well-oiled literary enterprise named ‘Vladimir Nabokov’ performed. Nabokov and his Books joins a number of straightforward and ostensibly simplified titles that have recently been released from the Oxford English Monographs series, such as Conrad and Women, Coleridge and the Doctors, Chaucer and Italian Textuality and Authorship and Appropriation. Nonetheless, thetitleandthetableofcontents(fivechaptersappropriatelylabelledwithaustere stylistic brevity: ‘Contexts’, ‘Inspiration’, ‘Reading’, ‘Publication’ and ‘Legacy’) should not misguide us: this monograph is as much about literature as it is about the ways that modern fiction is consumed and circulated. White begins by recapitulating the obvious: the success of Lolita not only made Nabokov wealthy but it ‘assured his novel the security in posterity that Humbert had sought for his Lolita’ (p. 3). The survival of the book entitled Lolita is, therefore, a material REVIEWS 347 expression of Humbert’s desire to preserve his love from the erosion of time. In his introduction White describes the emergence of Nabokov from personal and historical crisis; the author who narrowly escaped Nazi Germany and abandoned his readership and native Russian language was able to transform himself from an anonymous Russian writer who arrived on Ellis Island in 1940 into an author of a book about a paedophile that sold close to fifty million copies around the world by the end of the century. This was not an easy ride, though, according to White, who seeks to uncover the knotty relationship of late modernist ideas of authenticity and autonomy on the one hand, and pressures of the literary marketplace on the other. Defining Nabokov’s art as ‘a materially specific production’ (p. 8), White tests different normative boundaries and employs a special term, bibliopoetics, which encapsulates the conflict between Nabokov’s late modernism and the literary marketplace (although as readers of the ensuing chapters will realize, by becoming a successful professional writer Nabokov eventually won the battle to retain control over his published writings and even tried to dictate his own rules as he interacted with literary critics, publishers, editors and journalists). After elucidating the little-known aspects of Nabokov’s posthumously printed lectures on Don Quixote, the work that remains outside of the writer’s presumed canon, White goes on to survey Nabokov’s position in literary history. While one could argue that the monograph’s periodization (modernism, late modernism, the Cold War, etc.) is debatable, especially when it comes to reconciling several literary traditions to which the writer belonged or covertly engaged with (including contemporary Soviet fiction), it does offer White a convenient platform for contextualizing Nabokov’s oeuvre in sociohistorical...