Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

Читать Набокова — это все равно что сидеть в комнате, откуда открывается некий вид, который почему-то кажется нам миражом, словно бы хитро подмигивающим на солнце и заманивающим к себе. Некоторые читатели опасаются, что их выманивают из дома только для того, чтобы подставить ножку на пороге. На самом же деле Набоков хочет, чтобы хороший читатель, переступив через порог, попал в этот мир и насладился его подробной реальностью. Хороший же ПЕРЕчитыватель, который не боится идти дальше, находит еще одну дверь, скрытую в том, что прежде казалось незыблемым пейзажем, — дверь в иной, запредельный мир.

UNCERTAIN of his English in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov in January 1939 asked his friend Lucie Leon Noel to check his manuscript for solecisms. She recalls: Volodia started coming over several afternoons a week, around 3 p.m. He was always on time. He was most anxious that this first novel in English should sound neither "foreign" nor read as though it had been translated into English. We both sat at the large mahogany desk and worked for several hours each time.That mahogany table was the one at which for twelve years Paul Leon had worked with Joyce on Finnegans Wake: an apostolic succession for our times!

For Nabokov writing for the stage was like playing chess without his queen. In fiction his prose could thrive on capturing the unpredictables of the moment (a chance visual impression, a whim of private thought) and at the same time transcending the moment by the sheer force of style. In drama he can achieve neither effect. No wonder his moves on the chessboard of the stage seem at first glance so much weaker than his normal game. But Nabokov relished the challenge, and sought other modes of attack: a breakneck speed, a sense of headlong direction quite alien to his novels.

In The Gift Nabokov drew not only on his private life and on the progress of his art but also on the public world around him. Never again would he re-create in such exhaustive detail a city's parks and squares, its offices and shops, its buses and streetcars, its modes and mores. Fyodor's Berlin is of course the eccentric Berlin of the emigration, and above all emigre literary Berlin: soirees, readings, rivalries, reviews, the petty politics of the Union of Emigre Writers. Joyce liked to think that if Dublin were destroyed it could be re-created from Ulysses. Berlin's Russian literary emigration was destroyed by Hitler, but The Gift allows us to revisit that lost world.

To the distinguished Slavist Sir Bernard Pares, an old admirer of V. D. Nabokov, he wrote:I never thought that I could arrive at such a stage of financial distress, as I always supposed that as years went translations of my novels would help me to exist. It appears that I was mistaken: my literary earnings are so sparse as to be absolutely insufficient for the making of the most modest living, and the better I write and the greater my fame among connoisseurs, the more difficult it gets to have my works translated.