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Early Nabokov
| Article
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18928 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
3,448 Words |
| Author
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Charles A. Moser
Charles A. Moser is professor of Slavic languages at George
Washington University in Washington, D.C. He specializes in
Russian literature of the nineteenth century, a field of study
to which Vladimir Nabokov made important contributions.
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VLADIMIR NABOKOV
The Russian Years
Brian Boyd
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990
598 pp., $25.00
Vladimir Nabokov was a man of numerous, definite, and often contradictory opinions. The strength of his convictions often impelled him into conflict with his contemporaries--including Edmund Wilson, who befriended him soon after he arrived in the United States, and an earlier biographer, Andrew Field. This most recent biographer--Brian Boyd, senior lecturer in English at the University of Auckland--has been wise enough to undertake his work after Nabokov's life was completed (he died in 1977).
But Boyd is also bothered by the contradictions to be found in Nabokov's opinions and life, and feels himself obliged to resolve them. A portion of the "challenge" he faced in writing this biography, he says in his introduction, has been to tease out the harmony in Nabokov's life ... without suppressing the inconsistencies. ... How could someone with such a passion for literature, painting, and the abstraction and patterning of chess find music no more than "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds?" ... How could he believe so unshakably in democracy and never vote? Nabokov declared he knew nothing of social class and could remember twenty years later not only the cleaning lady of the laboratory where he once worked but even her domestic troubles. How then could he appear so snobbish to so many? Such apparent contradictions can be resolved.
So, at least, the biographer contends. But a writer is neither a philosopher nor a logician, and it is not in the least obligatory for all the illogicalities of any human life to be resolved. Pushkin, the man Nabokov admired most in the history of Russian literature, felt no compulsion to eliminate all the contradictions of the fictional world he created, and a good biographer need not be distressed if inconsistencies remain in the intellectual construct that he gives to us, his readers. And Boyd, after devoting nearly a decade to the research and writing of this large biography, does not in fact seek consistency at all costs.
Like Dmitry Mirsky, author of the classic history of nineteenth-century Russian literature, Nabokov had English and Russian half-lives: Although Russian was his native language, he grew up almost equally at home in English and, like Mirsky, produced much of his best work in
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