Nabokov’s Ego (LOLITA)

Letters, 1940-1977

For a long time I’ve possessed a fascination with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). I recently ordered his collected letters 1940-77 and I couldn’t put it down.

First, his general life plot was interesting: Born in Russia, he fled during the 1917 revolution and lived in Paris, Berlin, Switzerland, and finally the United States, in 1940—fleeing World War II—where he later became a U.S. citizen.

He was clearly a genius. He taught at Wellesley, in Massachusetts, and at Cornell, in both cases usually teaching Russian and European Literature. During these years he simultaneously wrote maniacally and feverishly. Almost always he had multiple books being written at the “same time,” switching from one to the other like a literary lunatic. His letters are rife with commentary on two, three books at a time. How he pulled this off, while also teaching, is beyond me. (Usually when a writer does this he or she is more of the Stephen King variety, penning quick, lucrative, bestselling thrillers, not producing “serious literature.”)

Nabokov was a consummate artist in the vein of Chekhov—who is probably his most realistic predecessor—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, or a writer such as Gustave Flaubert. Combining speed with literary quality is not an easy feat. Ditto moving from country to country fleeing war.

Nabokov also had some of the strongest artistic integrity I’ve ever read of. Whether he was arguing with Katherine White—editor at The New Yorker during the time he often published there in the 1940s and 50s—or else “yelling” at the author or publisher of a bad translation of some Russian author into English, Nabokov pulled no punches. He did not fear being rejected due to his arrogance and sophisticated determination to do things right in his eyes. He told editors, authors, publishers in no uncertain terms when they were, in his view, dead wrong. Sometimes these people caved, other times they did not. He accepted some editorial changes to his work, but usually only minor ones, and he battled fiercely to explain why he rejected many literary and editorial suggestions, usually going literally point by point in his detailed, meticulous letters.

Besides writing novels, Nabokov also penned a memoir—Conclusive Evidence, later Speak, Memory—as well as essays, criticism, poetry (some of his first work taken by The New Yorker) and translations. He translated Anna Kerenina, several books by Pushkin (primarily and most importantly Eugene Onegin) and many others, at first by himself and then later with his son, Dmitri. Often his commentary and editorial notes which accompanied the translations were 200, 300 pages long, at times dwarfing the length of the actual book being translated. The man was detailed, specific and passionate. He ripped bad translations and bad translators apart at every opportunity, explaining, sometimes word by word, how they’d screwed up.