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Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) - pen name Vladimir Sirin |
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Russian-born American novelist, critic, and acknowledged lepidopterist. Nabokov wrote both in Russian and English. His best-known novel, Lolita (1955), shocked many people but its humor and literary style were praised by critics. The first version of the story, Volshebnik (The Enchanter), was written in 1939 in Paris. The Enchanter centered on a middle-aged man, who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl and marries her sick, widowed mother to satisfy his erotic desires. He molests the girl in a Riviera hotel while she's asleep, she wakens and he runs into the traffic and dies. "Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose designate as "nymphets." (from Lolita) Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg into a wealthy,
aristocratic family. His father, Vladimir
Dimitrievich Nabokov, was a liberal politician, lawyer, and journalist.
The household was Anglophile – Nabokov spoke Russian and English, and
at the age of five he learned French. His father taught him to collect butterflies. Nabokov received his education at the Tenishev, St. Petersburg's most innovative school. At 16 he inherited a large estate from his father's brother, but he did not have much time to enjoy his wealth. During the Russian Revolution his father was briefly arrested. Nabokov brought a butterfly to his cell as a present. The family emigrated to Berlin and Nabokov entered Trinity College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1923. Vladimir Dimitrievich was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian monarchist. Nabokov spent 15 years in Berlin, where he worked as a translator, tutor, and tennis coach. From 1932-37 he lived with his wife and son at Nestorstrasse 22 in Wilmersdorf. He won acceptance as the leading young writer in the Russian community. Berlin was for him a city " "swarming with ragamuffins", as he said in the short novel Otchayanie (1936; Despair, 1937). Most of his readers were Russian émigrés – in the Soviet Russia his books were banned or ignored. In his early works Nabokov dealt with the death, the flow of time and sense of loss. Already using complex metaphors, his themes became later more ambiguous puzzles – he was a remarkable chess player – that challenge the reader to involve in the game. ''Readers are not sheep," he once wrote to a publisher, "and not every pen (pun) tempts them." In Lectures on Literature (1980) Nabokov wrote that to be a good reader one does not have to lean heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle, or belong to a book club. "The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense – which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance." In Zashchita Luzhina (1930, The Defense) Nabokov took the role of a grandmaster and played with the expectations of his readers. The protagonist, Aleksandr Luzhin, is a chess phenomenon, who becomes a character on a giant chessboard. Luzhin finds it increasingly difficult to make the transition from the world of the game to everyday reality. After suffering a mental breakdown, he recuperates slowly with the help of a young woman. Luzhin starts to believe that a cunning opponent is trying to manipulate the moves he makes in his life. He decides to throw himself out of a window and notices that the courtyard below seems to look like a giant chessboard. Luzhin is right: there is an opponent and he is Nabokov himself, who makes the point that the story is an artistic creation. As a writer Nabokov gained his first literary success with his
translations of some of Heine's songs. Nabokov's first novel, Mashenka (1926), was written in
Russia. In 1924 Nabokov married Véra
Evseevna Slonim, who came from a Jewish family; they had one son,
Dmitri. Nabokov's early nine novels were published under the pen name
Vladimir Sirin. These works included The Gift (1937-38), a
novel and an intellectual history of 19th-century Russia, and
Invitation to a Beheading (1938), a political fantasy, in which the
remaining days in the life the central character correspond to the
length of his pencil. Nabokov himself wrote everything in
longhand. "I cannot type," he confessed in an interview in 1962. Camera Obscura (1933, Laughter in the Dark), about love and obsession in nineteen-thirties Berlin, has been called a sister story to Lolilta.
Tony Richardson's film adaptation of the novel from 1969, starring
Nicol Williamson and Anna Karina, was set in the swinging London of the
sixties. When Hitler released the killer of his father, Nabokov moved
to
Paris in 1937. There he met the Irish novelist James Joyce. With a loan
he received from the composer Rachmaninov, Nabokov moved three years
later with his wife and son to the United
States – he crossed the ocean on the Champlain, where he had a
first-class cabin. He left behind in his Paris apartment a set of European butterflies. Nabokov taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University,
delivering highly acclaimed lectures on Flaubert, Joyce, Turgenev,
Tolstoy, and others. Among his major
critical works are his study of Nikolay Gogol (1944), and translation
of Aleksandr Pushkin's masterpiece Eugene Onegin
(1964), with
commentary. The ten-year-long work was first brought out by Bollingen
Foundation in four volumes. Nabokov cautioned against translating rhyme
by rhyme: "Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin
be truly translated with a retention of its rhymes. The answer is, of
course, no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem
literally is mathematically impossible." Nabokov's friend Edmund Wilson slaughtered the translation in The New York Review of Books, saying that with "his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre – he seeks to torture both the reader and himself." Anthony Burgess concluded in the Encounter that the translation was "a massive act of copulation with scholarship." In
the United States Nabokov continued his extensive
researches in
entomology, becoming a recognized authority on butterflies. He also
held a modest but official position at the Museum of Comparative
Zoology at Harvard University. The job lasted until 1948. "My pleasures
are the most intense known to a man," he once wrote, "writing and
butterfly hunting." As a
lepidopterist Nabokov was self-taught, but his attitude to scientific
work
was serious, not dilettantish. Especially he was interested in Blues,
the tribe Polyommatini, found all over the world. Later Nabokov
estimated that between the years 1949 and 1959 he traveled more than
150,000 miles on butterfly trips. His wife Vera drove their car;
Nabokov didn't have a driving licence. Once he had collected his
specimens he studied their genitalia. It was one of the best ways of
telling one species apart from another. Over 20 butterflies have
been named in his honour. His years at the museum Nabokov described as "the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life." In his boyhood Nabokov had already made notes on butterflies and in 1920 The Entomologist had published his article 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting," Nabokov once said. Nabokov's first publication in English was an article titled 'A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera'. Changing languages was not easy – ''What agony it was, in the early 'forties, to switch from Russian to English,'' he wrote in a letter in 1954. Nabokov's first novels in English were The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947). The Atlantic and the New Yorker started to publish Nabokov's short stories in the early 1940s. In America, apart from collecting his shorter prose of the 1930s into one book, Vesna v Fial'te, Nabokov published only memoirs and verse in Russian. Conclusive Evidence (1951) was an autobiography, which was later revived as Speak, Memory (1966), set mainly in pre-revolutionary Russia. When the Australian critic and writer Andrew Field planned to write a biography on Nabokov, the answer was: "I told everything about myself in Speak, Memory, and it was not a very pleasant portrait. I appear as a precious person in that book. All that chess and those butterflies. Not very interesting." It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster did not share his view. With Lolita Nabokov gained a huge success, although it was banned in Paris in 1956-58 and not published in full in America and the U.K. until 1958. Lolita is one of the most controversial novels of the 20th-century, in which the rhetoric of the protagonist both captivates and repels. The story deals with the desire of a middle-aged pedophile Humbert Humbert, the narrator, for a 12-year-old girl. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins," he starts his story. Humbert is said to be a metaphor for the writer and his art, and for the old world – Humbert is an European expatriate – encountering the new, represented by an American teenage girl, in all its vulgarity. Humbert keeps a prison-diary of his lifelong fascination with pubescent "nymphets". The first is Annabel Leigh, who dies of typhus, but then he finds Dolores Haze, his Lolita, in a New England town. She reminds him of the little girl he loved as a boy. During the course of the story, Humbert loses her to Clare Quilty, a playwright and pornographic filmmaker. Humbert kills him and dies in a prison of a heart attack. Lolita dies in childbirth as delivering a stillborn daughter. Stanley Kubrick's film version of the book was based on Nabokov's screenplay. "I knew that if I did not write the script somebody else would," Nabokov said, "and I also knew that at best the end product is such cases is less of a blend than a collision of interpretations." Lolita allowed Nabokov to abandon teaching and devote
himself entirely to writing. In 1957 Nabokov published Pnin, a story of a hapless Russian
professor of literature on an American college campus. Pale Fire (1962)
was an ambitious
mixture of literary forms, partly a one-thousand-line poem in heroic
couplets by John Francis Shade (1898-1959), partly a commentary on them
by a mad scholar-critic Charles Kinbote, who insists that he is the
deposed monarch of a kingdom called Zembla. "I can do what only a true
artist can do," describes Kinbote himself, "pounce upon the forgotten
butterfly or
revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things..."When Shade
is killed, he gathers up the notecards of the poet's last work, and
produces 'Pale Fire,' an edition of the poem. Kinbote's commentary on
it is many times longer than the work itself
and reveas more of Kinbote's own fixations than Shade's poem. From 1959 Nabokov lived in Switzerland, where his permanent home was at the Montreux Palace Hotel. He continued to collect butterflies, which after his death were stored at the Cantonal Museum of Zoology of Lausanne. Nabokov's later works include Ada (1969), a love story set on the planet of Antiterra, a mixture of Russia and America, Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1975), in which Nabokov's own life coincides occasionally with the protagonist's, also a writer. The writer's son Dmitri has undertook the translation of several of Nabokov's books from these later years. Nabokov himself wanted to be valued more as an American writer than a Russian one. In the Soviet Union he perhaps enjoyed greater fame than in the West. Nabokov died in Lausanne on July 2, 1977. For further reading: The Annotated Lolita by A. Apper Jr. (1970); Nabokov's Garden by B.A. Mason (1974); Vladimir Nabokov by L.L. Lee (1976); Nabokov Translated by J. Grayson (1977); VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov by A. Field (1986); Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years by B. Boyd (1990); Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by B. Boyd (1991); Vladimir Nabokov by T. Sharpe (1991); Small Alpine Form by C. Nicol and G. Barabtarlo (1993); The Magician's Doubts by Michael Wood (1994); The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. by Vladimir E. Alexandrov (1995); Lolita: A Janus Text by Lance Olsen (1995); Pniniad by Galya Diment (1997); Nabokov's Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery by Brian Boyd (2000); Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius by Kurt Johnson et al. (2001); Nabokov's World: Reading Nabokov by Jane Grayson (2002); Vladimir Nabokov by Jane Grayson (2003); Vladimir Nabokov: His Life and Works by Stanley P. Baldwin (2004); 'Vladimir Nabokov's Butterfly Genitalia Cabinet,' in The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield (2013); The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer (2013); Literary Rivals: Feuds and Antagonisms in the World of Books by Richard Bradford (2014); Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam (2016) - See other writers who combine fantastical elements, fabulations, with realistic narrative: Italo Calvino, Günter Grass, Umberto Eco. See also: Magic Realism. Selected works:
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