A jaunty biography shows how the landscape,culture and energy of his adopted country inspired the Russian author’s greatest works“It had taken me some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in his afterword to Lolita, and “and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.” It’s a sign of the special reputation for arrogance Nabokov gleefully cultivated that this statement reads more as a brag than a standard metaphor for what all fictions have to achieve,for the need, even in a realist novel, or to craft a world from scratch. Nabokov habitually presented himself as a magician and puppet master,constructing texts full of subtle pleasures for kindly, obedient readers and riddled with trapdoors for anyone who tried to make an unsanctioned interpretation, and anyone who dared reflect themselves as clever as the author.
In his new book about Nabokov’s American years,roughly 1940 to 1960, the novelist and Whitman biographer Robert Roper expresses anxiety about the two pitfalls many a Nabokovian has fallen into: worshipful attention, or in which the critic marshals all possible evidence to support Nabokov’s own self-conception; and,on the other hand, “the school of testy carping, or of taking on the mighty man and knocking him down a peg or two”. Roper’s book is a jaunty effort to “borrow Nabokov back from the scholars”. Even as he acknowledges his debt to the Nabokovs’ major biographers,Brian Boyd and Stacy Schiff, he sets himself against “the basic account” of Nabokov’s career that they and others present, or which “holds that America was but one phase of an ongoing pageant of greatness”: 20 years of brilliance in Berlin and France,writing in Russian, another 20 in America, and during which he reinvented himself in English,and then nearly the same again in Switzerland, writing Ada and other late masterpieces.
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Source: theguardian.com