The Life and Works of Vladimir Nabokov - An Overview of Nabokov's Major English-language Literary Works

Though he was a prolific Russian émigré writer in Europe, by the fall of 1938 Vladimir Nabokov's financial resources were depleted. He solicited a grant from the Russian Literary Fund in the United States, claiming: "My material situation has never been so terrible, so desperate." He received $20. Unable to get a French work permit, he cast about for academic and literary opportunities in England and America. Sharing a studio apartment in Paris with his wife, Véra, and his son, Dmitri, he composed his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, on a makeshift desk consisting of his suitcase placed over the bidet.




The following year, a fellow émigré poet and editor passed on an offer for a summer lectureship at Stanford University, in California. Nabokov seized the opportunity and immediately began composing lectures on Russian literature. He also wrote his first story in English, never published in his lifetime: "The Enchanter," a clear precursor to Lolita. In May 1940, he, Véra and Dmitri boarded the Champlain for the United States, an episode that is poignantly described in his memoir. He brought with him his lecture notes and the manuscript of Sebastian Knight.

James Laughlin, the young heir to a steel fortune and the head of the new publishing house New Directions, contacted Nabokov at the start of 1941, looking for publishable material. Nabokov responded with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, in which the Russian émigré narrator, V., is on the trail of his half brother, the writer Sebastian Knight. Laughlin accepted the novel and commissioned Russian translations and studies from Nabokov, and ultimately brought out Nikolai Gogol (1944), Three Russian Poets (1945) and Nine Stories (1947) before Nabokov left New Directions for more lucrative opportunities elsewhere. In 1954, Laughlin was among the American publishers that rejected Lolita, but in 1959 he capitalized on Lolita's success by reprinting Sebastian Knight.


First novel on American soil: Bend Sinister, 1947

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Bend Sinister, published by Henry Holt in 1947, was the first novel Nabokov published in the United States.

Bend Sinister, the first novel Nabokov composed in the United States, is his most overtly anti-Fascist, anti-Communist novel. He had envisioned it as early as 1942, with the title The Person From Porlock, later Game to Gunm[etal], and still later as Solus Rex, or possibly Vortex. He described it in broad strokes to friends in May 1946: "I propose to portray in this book certain subtle achievements of the mind in modern times against a dull-red background of nightmare oppression and persecution. The scholar, the poet, the scientist and the child--these are the victims and witnesses of a world that goes wrong in spite of its being graced with scholars, poets, scientists and children." The novel recounts the life of a philosopher, Adam Krug, who is blackmailed by an oppressive political regime into prostituting his talents. The tension within the novel is compounded as the protagonist gradually becomes aware of his status as a figment of Nabokov's imagination--"a device," Nabokov claimed, "never yet attempted in literature."

It took Nabokov four years to complete the manuscript and Doubleday four months to decide that "novels about 'dictators' have no appeal at present, that the public wants 'escapist' books and that therefore [the] novel would come out at the 'wrong' moment." Nabokov rejected the firm's offer of a $1,000 advance and the halfhearted enthusiasm it reflected, and accepted a more appealing proposal from Allen Tate at Henry Holt, whose letters of praise were ultimately backed by an offer twice that size.

Looking backward: Conclusive Evidence, 1951; Speak, Memory, 1967

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Allen Tate was Nabokov's most voluble champion at Henry Holt. Unfortunately, he left the publishing house before Bend Sinister was released in 1947. Without his support, the book was underpromoted and it failed commercially. This is a draft of a letter from Nabokov to Tate, from April 1947.

In 1946, Nabokov wrote to Doubleday that he was planning "a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel." From the start he envisioned it as a series of discrete but stylistically and thematically linked chapters. In 1936 he had written "Mademoiselle O.," a somewhat fictionalized portrait of his Swiss nanny Cécile Miauton, delivered at a reading in Brussels and published in a Parisian journal (Mesures).

From January 1948 to February 1951, Nabokov published 14 reminiscences in various American journals, primarily The New Yorker, and ultimately collected them as Conclusive Evidence in 1951. They covered the years between his "awakening of consciousness," in August 1903, at the age of 4, and a parallel dawning in his son and future translator, Dmitri, as his family left for the United States, in May 1940.

In the summer of 1953--"between butterfly-hunting and writing Lolita and Pnin"--he decided to translate Conclusive Evidence into a Russian "version and recomposition," and he sought Véra's help, lest another, less able contender make an attempt. The result, Drugie berega (Other shores), was published in New York by Chekhov House in 1954. Though his books were officially banned in the Soviet Union, he had a reasonably large audience among émigrés in the United States and in Europe.

Nabokov wrote to New Yorker fiction editor Katharine White that, after surviving the "atrocious metamorphosis" from Russian to American writer, "I swore I would never go back from my wizened Hyde form to my ample Jekyll one--but there I was, after fifteen years of absence,

NYPL, Berg Collection

These notes and diagrams, from a scrapbook of c.1943-8 entitled "Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides: On the Evolution of Wing Patterns," address one of the primary concerns of Nabokov's lepidopterological research.

wallowing again in the bitter luxury of my Russian verbal might." Nabokov found that recalling "Russian memories" in his native tongue sharpened the images in his mind, and called attention to the deficiencies of Conclusive Evidence.He began a revised English-language edition in 1965, published in 1967 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, in which he incorporated recent corrections and, as he wrote in the foreword, "introduced basic changes and copious additions." He continued, "What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth. On the other hand, a number of facts relating to ancestors and other personages have come to light and have been incorporated in this final version of Speak, Memory."

Aesthetic bliss: Lolita, 1955

In 1953, having nearly completed Lolita, his "enormous, mysterious, heartbreaking novel," after "five years of monstrous misgivings and diabolical labors," Nabokov declared that it "has had no precedent in literature." He embarked on the quest for an American publisher, telling each of five houses--Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar Straus, and Doubleday--to use the utmost discretion in allowing the manuscript to leave their desks. No one would publish it. The Partisan Review agreed to print a portion of it, but only on the condition that Nabokov sign the work. Fearing that he'd be identified with his protagonist, he wrote in a December 23, 1953, note to Katharine White, "its subject is such that V., as a college teacher, cannot very well publish it under his real name."

Then Madame Doussia Ergaz, Nabokov's de facto agent in Paris since the early 1930s, suggested Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press, who published the novel in English in 1955. Years later, Nabokov would vehemently claim to have been unaware of the salacious, pseudonymously published "obscene novelettes" that were Girodias's bread and butter. On July 18, 1955, he wrote to his new publisher, "You and I know that Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such. A succés de scandale would distress me."

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Notes written by Nabokov about finishing Lolita.

Despite this hope, Lolita received no public attention until after it was banned in France, along with many other Olympia Press titles, under pressure from the British Home Office, and Graham Greene included it in a year-end list of the three best novels of 1955. Greene helped shepherd the first British edition into print, writing to Nabokov that "in England one may go to prison, but there couldn't be a better cause!"

Though copies of the Girodias edition were making it into the United States, Nabokov still wished for an American edition. Jason Epstein, then an editor at Doubleday, hoped to convince Doubleday's president, Douglas Black, to take the novel, by playing upon Black's desire to refight the court battle he had recently lost over Edmund Wilson's The Memoirs of Hecate County. In an attempt to gain ground, Epstein arranged for an excerpt (about a third of the novel) to appear in Doubleday's June 1957 Anchor Review, with critical praise from Partisan Review editor F.W. Dupee. The Anchor volume featured Nabokov's specially written explanation of the genesis of the novel and his defense of it on the grounds of "aesthetic bliss": "On a Book Entitled Lolita."

Throughout the summer and into the fall, Nabokov endured delays and denials by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and even Putnam's. He settled on the small independent publisher Ivan Obolensky, but when his offer, too, fell through, Putnam's made good on an earlier proposal, and went into production.

On publication day, Putnam's president, Walter Minton, sent a congratulatory telegram:

EVERYBODY TALKING OF LOLITA ON PUBLICATION DAY YESTERDAYS REVIEWS MAGNIFICENT AND NEW YORK TIMES BLAST THIS MORNING [panning the novel] PROVIDED NECESSARY FUEL TO FLAME 300 REORDERS THIS MORNING AND BOOK STORES REPORT EXCELLENT DEMAND CONGRATULATIONS ON PUBLICATION DAY.

By the end of the day, 2,600 orders had been received. 

A safe bet pays off: Pnin, 1957

Knowing from the start that he might never find a publisher for Lolita--and that, if he did, he might have to resign his main source of income, a teaching position at Cornell University--Nabokov began Pnin around the same time, in the hope of securing an income and an audience. 

NYPL, Berg Collection

The first Swedish edition of Pnin was reportedly burned when Nabokov declared Nils Kjellstrom's version defective. These are Nabokov's notes on the translation, recorded by Véra in a Cornell University examination book, c.1958.

He knew that the adventures of the star-crossed Russian émigré lecturer at an American university, drawn from his observations and experiences, would appeal to The New Yorker's editors and readers. Four of the seven chapters were happily published in the magazine, one at the end of 1953 and three in 1955. When Doubleday brought out the full work, in 1957, Nabokov received the first of five National Book Award nominations (he never won the prize).

The book's popularity--due in large part to its New Yorker serialization--was unprecedented in Nabokov's career; Pnin went into a second printing within two weeks of publication. Edmund Wilson attempted to explain the work's success, writing Nabokov that he "may at last have made contact with the great American public--the reviews I have so far seen all say exactly the same thing: this shows that no one is puzzled, they know how they are meant to react." Perhaps surprisingly, Kingsley Amis was appalled by the novel. He wrote: "That this limp, tasteless salad of Joyce, Chaplin, Mary MacCarthy [sic] and of course Nabokov (who should know better) has had delighted noises made over it by Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell and Graham Greene is a mystery of some dimensions."

The greatest of invented poets: Pale Fire, 1962

Nabokov called Pale Fire's form "specifically, if not generically, new." "Generically," perhaps, it is his answer to the verse novel, exemplified by Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Specifically, it is centered on the title poem, "Pale Fire," a 999-line verse, divided into four cantos, by the fictional deceased poet John Shade--in Nabokov's estimation, "by far the greatest of invented poets." The poem is introduced by the supposedly mad critic Charles Kinbote, in a foreword written in the spirit of Nabokov's own explanatory forewords. Kinbote also provides a 300-page "commentary" and index, which together recount the history of Zembla, "a distant Northern land."

NYPL, Berg Collection

Nabokov composed a number of his later works (here, Pale Fire) on index cards. As he observed in a 1967 interview: "Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient when not following the logical sequence of chapters but preparing instead this or that passage at any point in the novel and filling in the gaps in no special order."

Nabokov had been turning over various seeds of Pale Fire as early as 1939, but its final form did not crystallize until 1960. When he submitted the poem, originally called "The Brink," to Esquire in 1961, he told the editor Rust Hills that it was "racy and tricky, and unpleasant, and bizarre." (Esquire rejected the piece, as the magazine never published poetry.) The novel was published in April 1962, and by summer it was a best-seller, despite the complexity of the narrative and the fact that, according to Nabokov, "few reviewers realized what it was really about." Reviews were mixed, but Mary McCarthy's encomium in her New Republic review, "A Bolt From the Blue," eclipsed them all: she called it "one of the very great works of art of this century." Pale Fire, too, was nominated for but did not win the National Book Award.

Complex and cosmopolitan: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, 1969
 
Nabokov once referred to Ada as his "most cosmopolitan and poetic novel." Simultaneously a family epic of the Russian aristocracy, a literary history of Russia and a meditation on the nature of time, Ada is arguably Nabokov's most difficult book. It takes place on Anti-Terra, while the existence of Terra, our Earth, is debatable. It is Nabokov's most complex novel, linguistically and thematically, and is dense with games and deceptions, and with literary, historical, scientific and cultural allusions. Derived from Russian, American and Nabokovian contexts, it is written in Russian, French and English. And the subject matter--a contented, incestuous love affair that spans the youth and happy old age of the couple--alienated some in his traditional audience.

NYPL, Berg Collection

This note card for Ada, c. 1966, includes notes for a description of the Russian version of Scrabble played by Ada, Van and Lucette.

On the surface, Ada is framed as the work of a philosopher--Van Veen--and includes some of Van Veen's own philosophical writing on the nature of time. Appropriately, Nabokov's structure for the novel dictates that, after the first part, each of the four remaining parts is only half the length of the preceding one. Ada is also the memoir of Van's lifelong affair with his sister, and includes some of his correspondence with Ada, along with his reminiscences of the relationship.

The novel is divided into five parts, and eight chapters from the first part were--astonishingly, perhaps--printed in Playboy. Columbia Pictures paid half a million dollars for the film rights (but a movie was never made), and Time did a cover story on Nabokov, coinciding with the book's publication. Two New York Times reviews were reverent and ecstatic.

But a critical onslaught followed both the initial avalanche of praise and a 20-week stay on the New York Times best-seller list. Mary McCarthy so loathed the novel that she considered retracting her unqualified praise of Pale Fire. Perhaps in response to these attacks, Nabokov appended to the first paperback edition, brought out by Penguin, the explanatory afterword "Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom" (an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov), a list of approximately 500 translations, identifications and explanations, listed by page number.

Listening through thin walls: Transparent Things, 1972

NYPL, Berg Collection

This typescript of Transparent Things includes Nabokov's corrections and notes from the editors, signed and dated April 1, 1972.

Transparent Things, a novella and National Book Award nominee, was published after first appearing in the December 1971 issue of Esquire. This deceptively slim chaser to Ada had taken Nabokov more than two years, off and on, to complete, and reviewers scarcely knew what to make of it. With a complex network of disembodied narrators, it was inspired in part by Nabokov's stays in thin-walled hotel rooms on his travels across America which allowed him access to the unseen worlds of his neighbors. Finished on April Fool's Day, 1971, it was not issued in book form until the end of the following year.

On publication day, he wrote in his diary that reviews "oscillat[ed] between hopeless adoration and helpless hatred. Very amusing." One such review called it "an unlovely and unlovable book that begins to touch the reader only the second time around. It is a masterpiece, of course." In an interview published in 1973, Nabokov stated: "Amongst the reviewers several careful readers have published some beautiful stuff about it. Yet neither they nor, of course, the common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story." He assisted by sketching its theme, "a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies." Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd's analysis attempts to untie that "knot" with a more specific elucidation: "Within the small compass of Transparent Things and the bleak life of Hugh Person, Nabokov ruptures the relationship of reader, character, and author more radically than he has ever done, in order to explore some of his oldest themes: the nature of time; the mystery and privacy of the human soul, and its simultaneous need to breach its solitude; the scope of consciousness beyond death; the possibility of design in the universe."

Final novel: Look at the Harlequins!, 1974
 
Still largely overlooked in critical circles, Look at the Harlequins!--Nabokov's last published novel--recounts the autobiography of Vadim Vadimych N., whose life and work seem to parody the biography that a wayward scholar might create of Nabokov himself. (He wrote in 1973 of the research by Andrew Field, one of his biographers: "It was not worth living a far from negligible life only to have a blundering ass reinvent it.") This also recalls a lecture, "Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible," that Nabokov delivered in 1937 on the evils of "fictionalized biographies."

Reviews of Look at the Harlequins! were mixed; readers who had been put off or dismayed by Ada and Transparent Things were charmed by this readable tale, but to those who saw the merits of Nabokov's previous two novels it seemed weak. Richard Poirier, in a somewhat narrow critique in the New York Times Book Review, deduced that "there are few reasons to be surprised, and many reasons to be disappointed, by the complicated interplay between Vladimir Nabokov and the narrator of this, his 37th book."

Despite such criticism, Look at the Harlequins! was nominated for the National Book Award, but, like Pnin, Pale Fire, Transparent Things and Tyrants Destroyed, it did not win. Perhaps most interestingly, Look at the Harlequins! contains a realistic return to Russia that Nabokov never undertook. Though he was opposed to visiting countries where totalitarianism dominated, Nabokov gleaned information from friends and family who had returned to Russia and adapted their details into Vadim Vadimych's homecoming, just as James Joyce had pumped relations in Dublin for some of the local color that appears in Ulysses. Nabokov died in 1977, never having returned to Russia.

A note from Vladimir Nabokov
 

Nabokov wrote in the introduction to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964):

Rough drafts, false scents, half explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.

Rodney Phillips, Sarah Funke

The New York Public Library