The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (2 page)

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The rich and aristocratic Nabokovs were not the “White Russian” stock figures of Western liberal demonology—all monocles, Fabergé snuffboxes, and reactionary opinions—but rather a family with a long tradition of high culture and public service. Nabokov’s grandfather
was Minister of Justice under two tsars and implemented the court reforms, while Nabokov’s father was a distinguished jurist, a foe of anti-Semitism, a prolific journalist and scholar, a leader of the opposition party (the Kadets), and a member of the first parliament (Duma). In 1919 he took his family into exile, co-editing a liberal émigré daily in Berlin until his death in 1922 (at age fifty-two), at a political meeting, where he was shot while trying to shield the speaker from two monarchist assassins. Young Nabokov went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1922 taking an honors degree in Slavic and Romance Languages. For the next eighteen years he lived in Germany and France, writing prolifically in Russian. The spectral émigré communities of Europe were not large enough to sustain a writer, and Nabokov supported himself through translations, public readings of his works, lessons in English and tennis, and, fittingly, the first Russian crossword puzzles, which he composed for a daily émigré paper. In 1940 he and his wife and son moved to the United States, and Nabokov began to write in English. The frequently made comparison with Joseph Conrad denies Nabokov his signal achievement; for the Polish-born author was thirty when he started to write in English, and, unlike the middle-aged Nabokov, he had not written anything in his native language, let alone nine novels.
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In America, Nabokov lectured on Russian literature at Wellesley (1941–1948) and Cornell (1948–1958), where his Masterpieces of European Fiction course proved immensely popular. While at Wellesley he also worked on Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Nabokov’s several books in English had meanwhile earned him the quiet respect of discerning readers, but
Lolita
was the first to attract wide attention. Its best-sellerdom and film sale in 1958 enabled Nabokov to resign his teaching position and devote himself to his writing in Montreux, Switzerland, where he took up residence in 1960. When the first edition of
The Annotated Lolita
went to press, he was working on a new novel
(Transparent Things)
and a history of the butterfly in Western art, and planning for the future publication of several works, including his Cornell lectures, his screenplay of
Lolita
(only parts of which were used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film), and a selection of his Russian poems, translated by Nabokov and about to be published, together with his chess problems, as
Poems and Problems
.

Lolita
had made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov. Although praised by influential critics,
Lolita
was treated as a kind of miracle of spontaneous
generation, for Nabokov’s
oeuvre
was like an iceberg, the massive body of his Russian novels, stories, plays, and poems remaining untranslated and out of sight, lurking beneath the visible peaks of
Lolita
and
Pnin
(1957). But in those eleven years since Putnam’s had published
Lolita
, twenty-one Nabokov titles had appeared, including six works translated from the Russian, three out-of-print novels, two collections of stories,
Pale Fire
(1962), the monumental four-volume translation of Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
(1964),
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
(1966)—a considerably revised and expanded version of the memoir first issued in 1951 as
Conclusive Evidence
—and
Ada
(1969), his fifteenth novel, whose publication celebrated his seventieth birthday. The publication of
Mary
(1926) and
Glory
(1931), then being Englished by, respectively, Michael Glenny and Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, would complete the translation of his Russian novels.

This extraordinary outburst of Nabokoviana highlights the resolute spirit of the man who published his masterpieces,
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
, at the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three, respectively. Nabokov had endured the exigencies of being an émigré writer when the Western world seemed interested only in his inferior Soviet contemporaries, and emerged not only as a major Russian writer but as the most important living American novelist. No doubt some academic pigeonholers still worried about Nabokov’s nationality and where to “place” him, but John Updike had solved this synthetic problem when he described Nabokov as “the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship.”
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Not since Henry James, an émigré in his own right, had an American citizen created so formidable a corpus of work.

Nabokov’s pronounced antipathy to Freud and the novel of society continued to alienate some critics during his lifetime, but there was a reason for the delay in achieving his proper status more basic than the unavailability of his early books or his failure to conform to some accepted school or
Zeitgeist
pattern: readers trained on the tenets of formalist criticism simply did not know what to make of works which resist the search for ordered mythic and symbolic “levels of meaning” and depart completely from post-Jamesian requisites for the “realistic” or “impressionistic” novel—that a fiction be the impersonal product of a pure aesthetic impulse, a self-contained illusion of reality rendered from a consistently held point of view and through a central intelligence from which all authorial comment
has been exorcised. Quite the opposite happens in Nabokov’s fiction: his art must be seen as artifice, even when its verisimilitude is most convincing and compelling, as in
Lolita
; and the fantastic, a-realistic, and involuted forms toward which even his earliest fictions evolve make it clear that Nabokov had always gone his own way, and it was not the way of the novel’s Great Tradition according to F.R. Leavis. But Nabokov’s eminence signaled a radical shift in opinions about the novel and the novelist’s ethical responsibilities. A future historian of the novel may one day claim that it was Nabokov, more than any of his contemporaries, who kept alive an exhausted art form not only by demonstrating new possibilities for it but by reminding us, through his example, of the variegated aesthetic resources of his great forebears, such as Sterne and the Joyce who was a parodist rather than a symbolist.

In addition to its qualities as a memoir,
Speak, Memory
serves, along with Chapter Five in
Gogol
(1944), as the ideal introduction to Nabokov’s art, for some of the most lucid criticism of Nabokov is found in his own books. His most overtly parodic novels spiral in upon themselves and provide their own commentary; sections of
The Gift
(1937–1938) and
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941) limpidly describe the narrative strategies of later novels. Nabokov’s preoccupations are perhaps best projected by bringing together the opening and closing sentences of
Speak, Memory
: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye, the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.”
The Eye
(1930) is well titled; the apprehension of “reality” (a word that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.” Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchantment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes about in
Art and Illusion
—everything is
there
, in sight (no symbols lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the
trompe-l’oeil
, which eventually reveals something totally different from what one had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled
picture” has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has been expanded or created.

The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in
Pale Fire
) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in
Speak, Memory
Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of
Pnin
is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures.

Speak, Memory
rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in
Invitation to a Beheading
(1936), and Krug in
Bend Sinister
(1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in
Speak, Memory
, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of
The Eye
, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in
Pale Fire
, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in
Tyrants Destroyed
[1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters.

Although
Speak, Memory
clearly illuminates the self-parodic content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aesthetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily
misunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in
Speak, Memory
Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel
The Gift
with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of
Speak, Memory
with
The Gift
, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in
Speak, Memory
with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in
Pale Fire
Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré. Exile is a correlative for all human loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as
Lolita
, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. “Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mirrors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant Producer” [1943], in
Nabokov’s Dozen
[1958]).