Reviews for Vladimir Nabokov

The average rating for Vladimir Nabokov based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-23 00:00:00 Rhoderick Patricio “...every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows.” -Speak, Memory Above is one of my favorite pictures of Nabokov. “Nabokov smiling in the rain”. This is the Nabokov of his American years, plumped up after a doctor ordered him to stop smoking his regular 4 or more packs a day (he replaced his cigarette habit with a habit of maple candies), a look of Jacques Tati about him, or an attractive Hitchcock. What I love most about this picture, though, is the laughing eyes and the smile under the dripping hood of the rain jacket. “Smiling in the rain” is such an apt summation, too, of his attitude toward life. The man who created Humbert, Kinbote, the destroying worlds of Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, the artist so mislabeled by so many as cruel, misanthropic, distant, elitist, full of hauteur to the point of self-parody, was in reality, behind the public masks he would don (as much out of a love of playfulness as a desire for privacy), a man greatly concerned with morals, the search for happiness, the imposing of order on a seemingly chaotic existence, the appreciation of familial love, the search for the bright particularity that claimed a thing or a person from the oblivion of generality, obscurity, vulgarity. Nabokov’s whole philosophy, and the greater part of his body of literature, can almost be summed up as the quest for the dignity of the individual. The fictional character he created that was closest in biographical details to himself, The Gift’s Godunov-Cherdyntsev, considers naming a book he envisions writing "a practical handbook: How to Be Happy"; and as strange as it may seem at first glance, even in books such as Lolita and Despair, this indeed was Nabokov’s aim throughout his entire life and work. This is even more remarkable when one considers how beleaguered and hounded by history Vladimir and his family were, from the loss of their wealth and estate in the Russian revolution, to their flight across Russia and Europe, his poverty in Berlin, the assassination of his father, the striving to hone his craft in Russian only to be forced to give up his beloved native tongue and relearn it all again in English when Hitler made Europe uninhabitable, his and Véra and Dmitri’s perilous escape from France (the apartment building they lived in in Paris was destroyed by a bomb two weeks after they left for America, the ship they took to America was sunk by a Nazi U Boat on the very next Atlantic crossing after their own), and decades more of constant work, transience and poverty after they finally arrived on Ellis Island in 1940. If anyone had reason to fall into pessimism, defeatism, and negativity, it was Nabokov. Instead, what he remembers most about his arrival in America is that while going through customs after departing the boat in New York Harbor, the agents found in his luggage a pair of boxing gloves he had brought along to teach a young Dmitri- they put them on, began to dance about and jokingly spar with the author. His welcome into America was just the happy surprise he would come to cherish and seek out in life around him, even when history and circumstance seemed to be mounting up odds against him. After 40 years of uncertainty and flight from the tremors of history, America finally provided the refuge the writer needed to realize himself, and all the circumstances of that life seemed to prod him ever closer to the fulfillment his own peculiar destiny, one he had vaguely envisioned for himself since childhood. Despite everything, the Nabokovs ended up the champions in the duel with fate and time. No wonder then, with a life so different from others, so struck through with what seems to be the evidence of a beneficent hand of fate intervening when cataclysm appears inevitable, that Nabokov’s art became a reflection of this search for pattern and meaning in apparent chaos, the significant detail that illuminates a destiny and foretells a breach in the walls of the prisons of time and the senses. What readers most overlook in Nabokov’s fiction is that ever present but invisible next dimension, the place beyond the story, or death, or time, where the real action of the narrative is being orchestrated. Most wouldn’t think that the true heroine of Ada is the neglected Lucette, or that the center of Pale Fire is neither Shade nor Kinbote but Shade’s doomed daughter (and perhaps even the redeeming nature of familial love itself), that poor tortured Lo, dead from the outset of the novel, was only second to Pnin in the characters that Nabokov himself claimed to love and admire. In all of Nabokov’s mature fiction, dimensions are layered on top of dimensions, morals are inverted and tested against each other, nothing is stable, mirrors abound, and everything feels built of chimeras, ghosts, false floors and trap doors. His prose feels so artificially wrought at times because the stage set is made of transparent things, the workmen are adjusting the props to make up for negligent fate, the man controlling the spotlight might be insane or a murderer, what we are told only reaches us through the refraction of the fictional consciousness we happen to be momentarily settled in, and every book is a carefully planned Funhouse. To make one’s way through these artful Funhouses, one must always keep in mind that Nabokov was as passionate a scientist as he was a writer. In many ways, his approach to composing fiction was most influenced by the observations he made in the natural world, in particular his lifelong study of lepidoptera. He saw in the elaborateness of nature’s designs an artistic pleasure that the universe seemed to be taking part in- that in the regularity within all structures (atoms, crystals, leaves, the miniscule patterning on a moth’s wings, etc.) there are patterns that seem to be created for the pleasure of our understanding, the deepening of our knowledge alone. In this view, the universe is far from innocent, it is an active participant in our intelligent awakening- it scatters its evidence about in what appears a random toss of debris, but in the intersection of human consciousness with space and time we are trained to seek out its harmonies and meanings, and these point to an order that exists, even if just outside the limits of our perception. If we had the ability to free consciousness from the prison of the senses, to step past the mortal boundary lines and take things in on a universal scale, we might apprehend the entire fabric of our past and future in one timeless gaze, seeing all the moments of our lives that were and are to be in their shining significance, a jigsaw puzzle finished as a complete, recomposed picture- a closed book. The closed worlds of all his mature novels and stories reflect and test this philosophy, in their content and in the style of Nabokov’s prose. Whether Luzhin plummets to his death toward a hallucinated chess board, or Humbert dashes his head to pieces on the bars of his cell, or Van Veen and Ada die into the text of their book, or Shade passes into the mind of Kinbote who passes into the real author of Pale Fire, or Pnin drives off proudly into an unknown but radiantly promising future that redeems the pain of his past, they all come up against this wall that separates their consciousnesses from the infinity of freedom that just exceeds their grasp. Consciousness is the only place where human beings have total autonomy. The mind and the imagination are the only places where limits are meaningless, where potential is unfettered. Yet each mind is also an impenetrable confinement; no matter our efforts we can never step outside of our mortality, and how a character deals with this confinement, how it blinds them or buoys them up, determines the fate of the individual and the story we have been told. Nabokov the writer strews fate's paths with clues all along- anagrams, palindromes, word games, mirror-words and worlds, inversions, doubles, masks- because in his artifice he is attempting to replicate the processes of the first, the greatest artificer, nature herself. The trust he puts into his little scientist-readers is that they will take the time to unweave the knots he has composed in the lines of prose, to search out the telling repetitions, to piece together the fragmented clues left for our intelligence to pleasurably reassemble. He expects us to approach his worlds as humanity approaches the World itself. What he is composing for us is the pleasure of discovery itself. If one had to place Nabokov the artist among these worlds he created, one would have to think of Transparent Things, and that disembodied voice in the first sentence of the novel beckoning out toward a “person”, a reader, whose attention the voice is struggling to attract. Transparent Things was inspired by Nabokov’s stay in a cheap hotel and his not being able to shut out the sounds of the other tenants drifting in from the thin walls of the adjacent room. Eventually he became invested in these incorporeal voices, he began to know details of their existences, their habits, he began to ask himself questions about their lives. The novel came to be by taking this idea into “the following dimension”: what if the walls of life and death, time, space, and oblivion were as thin as the walls of this hotel? What if those who had passed on, or those existing in other realms of space and time, could casually overhear and become invested in our lives? What if these otherworldly beings could take things a step farther and begin to intervene in our lives? How would they approach us through the dimensional mists? What clues in our space-time-matter would their intervening hand leave for us to comprehend? And if we trained ourselves to listen, could we hear into the workings of other dimensions? “Metaphysics will not die until humanity does” says Brian Boyd in The Russian Years. Nabokov’s metaphysics of fate and time provide the blueprints for understanding the Funhouses he left us to explore. Without this understanding, much of what he was attempting to express in his writing will remain obscure. Art can never solve these mortal dilemmas, but it can point in a hopeful direction, and I see Nabokov’s works as signposts, tests, little trials of his characters coming up against the walls of their finity and finality. At the same time, as with all great art, they take the edge off of that mortality, let us glimpse through the fissures what can’t be gleaned unless we push intelligence and consciousness, those two realms where humanity blooms best, to the very edge of their limitations. ”Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.”

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-19 00:00:00 Bobby Fairchid Boyd’s two part biography of Nabokov is absolutely enthralling. Boyd seamlessly weaves biographical details about his subject with literary criticism about the works of his subject. Ultimately, I cannot imagine a more complete picture of Vladimir Nabokov; further, in this picture Nabokov is truly (and accurately) painted as one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century. * Boyd identifies one of VN’s most pressing concerns as the absurd inability of human consciousness to return to the ever fleeting moments of the past. However, rather than bore readers with a list of dates and facts, Boyd manages to bring Nabokov’s past to life. Readers are able to follow VN on his many whimsical lepidopterological pursuits and chuckle as the scientist/author perilously braves both bear and rattlesnake (at times blissfully in his own world) in his hunt for butterflies. “Once he was so intent on the chase that he stepped on a slumbering bear” (33). Throughout, Boyd not only interestingly depicts the dogged pursuit of VN, but also explains how this fascination and dedication to the exactitudes of science help shape his world view and, by proxy, his novels. Some of the most entertaining passages were those in which Boyd revisits VN’s time as a college professor. It is hard not to imagine Pnin himself when Boyd recounts the time that VN, in a rush to be on time to his class, entered a classroom a door too soon. He confidently walked to the front of the room and began his carefully prepared lecture in front of 30 stunned students. When graciously informed that he was in the wrong class, VN announced “‘You have just seen the “Coming Attraction” for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may register next fall’” (299). He gathered his notes, entered the correct classroom and told his students that “‘A most extraordinary thing has just happened, most extraordinary.’” Add to this vignettes about students leaving and/or protesting his class because of his blatant contempt for many of the “great” authors, the unremitting exactitude he required on his exams, and the humorous way he taught Russian and it would be hard not to enjoy reading about these parts of his life. One thing I found appallingly fascinating is the penury VN lived in most of his life (described thoroughly in both parts of Boyd’s biography). Even after becoming a preeminent émigré writer, he was constantly requesting financial assistance. It shocks me that not until Lolita (and what a story there is behind the publication of that!) did he actually gain fame and financial independence. Perhaps more striking, though, is the supreme confidence that both he and his truly exceptional wife, Vera, had that other would indeed one day recognize his brilliance. * Boyd does a wonderful job splicing together VN’s life and the many inspirations that prompted him to write his stories with thorough criticism of the works themselves. In this half more so than the first part of the biography, full chapters are dedicated to dissecting each of VN’s novels. Boyd proves himself a very astute critic as well as a biographer, and anyone who reads Pale Fire absolutely must read the chapter Boyd dedicates to dissecting it. Never would I have believed that 1,300 pages of biography could be so illuminating, engaging, and just so damn interesting. As much credit as VN deserves for living such an amazing life, Boyd deserves at least as much for so thoroughly chronicling it in a way that truly bring Vladimir Nabokov to life once again—allowing the great author to be indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of all readers.