Stephen H. Blackwell
Although Nabokov often humbly professed to be lacking in business savvy, he certainly did a better job managing his accounts than did his character Hermann in Despair. Of course, in the early years of his career as a writer, Nabokov did not have the opportunity to worry much about the sales of his works, nor about the health of the book-publishing trade and his place in it. The number of his readers was relatively small. Although there were briefly perhaps as many as ten million Russian expatriates following the revolution, that number soon dwindled for a variety of reasons.1 By the time Nabokov was publishing novels, there were probably less than one million Russian speakers among the Europe emigration, many of whom probably could not afford the luxury of purchasing books (in addition to the fact that many were of military, rather than intellectual, backgrounds).2 Publication itself was quite frenetic, with Russians abroad having virtually unprecedented svoboda slova (“freedom of expression”) while an abundance of publishing houses produced thousands of books and journals, and thus a great deal of competition for a limited pool of readers.3 At the same time, Nabokov could not devote all of his energy to writing, as he also had to busy himself with teaching lessons in English, French, and tennis. This situation continued after he moved from Europe to the United States, where he put in long hours in the 1940s as a professional lepidopterist while simultaneously holding a teaching position at Wellesley, followed by his ten years as a professor at Cornell. However, even early in his career as a writer of novels in English, Nabokov began to take an interest in the way publishers marketed his works. As he metamorphosed in America from a little-known writer of modestly successful books to a famous, best-selling, and provocative author, Nabokov took on a role in regard to the publication of his works that demonstrated his keen interest in the success of his personal publishing industry. Ever aware of the benefits of publicity, Nabokov managed his extraliterary appearances in such a way as to heighten public interest in himself and his work. All this was done—masterfully, and not without conscious irony—even as he was promoting his image as a champion of “pure art.” In fact, there was no contradiction of these two perspectives. The tension between this image and the countervailing, opportunistic one that some readers and critics ascribed to him generated a healthy amount of the interest that was shown him throughout the post-Lolita years.
The first sign of Nabokov’s market awareness was his transition out of the Russian language, begun already in 1936. Recognizing that his gifts gave him the possibility of choosing a new language and audience for his art, as his hoped-for Russian audience dwindled, dispersed, or assimilated to European host countries, Nabokov translated Kamera Obskura and Despair into English, also composing The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in English and “Mademoiselle O” in French. Naturally, he wanted to make a living using his talents and his calling as an author, and there was little hope of doing so in his beloved Russian tongue. So his switch to English, which he described as a wrenching transition (he called it an “atrocious metamorphosis”4), can be seen as a pragmatic move that allowed him to continue to practice his art with some hope of deriving both recognition and remuneration from it. Just over a year after arriving in the U.S., Nabokov was already telling his first American publisher, James Laughlin, about a small promotional success he had had in securing mention of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in The New Yorker’s book-notice column.5
Despite his disingenuous confession that he had never been able to “push” his books, Nabokov was already beginning to demonstrate a talent for assuring that his name appeared in ways that would reinforce, and even spur, the sales of his books.6 Most often, this knack can be seen in his keen devotion to regular sales of articles and stories to prestigious publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Statesman. Although these placements were financial necessities as much as they were promotional moves, it is clear that he understood the relationship between magazine exposure and book sales early on. When fame descended on him, Nabokov was already well equipped to take full advantage of the barrage of press attention that rushed to his disposal.
There is good reason to be skeptical both of Brian Boyd’s assertion that with Lolita, Nabokov had no idea he would “shock the public into taking notice,”7 and of Nabokov’s own suggestion that he would be distressed by a succès de scandale—although, of course, he would have been disappointed if that were its only success.8 In the first place, the fact that Nabokov refers cryptically to Lolita as a “timebomb” in a 1954 letter to James Laughlin9 reveals his awareness of its likely shock value, as does the intense secrecy surrounding his proffering of the manuscript to various potential publishers—not to mention his insistence, eventually abandoned, that it be published pseudonymously. Nabokov was no stranger to the lift that a good controversy, not to say scandal, could give to any book. As it turns out, Iulii Aikhenvald, Nabokov’s close friend in the 1920s and a hugely influential Russian critic in the first quarter of the twentieth century, had profited in just this way in the years before the Bolshevik revolution. Aikhenvald’s highly critical “silhouette” of Vissarion Belinsky, published in 1911 in the second edition of his very popular Silhouettes of Russian Writers, moved him into the spotlight of public intellectual debate. Full of strong (mostly negative) opinions about Belinsky’s critical acumen, Aikhenvald’s piece evoked a prolific backlash, giving him the opportunity to publish a whole booklet on Belinsky. In it he defended, point by point, the validity of his factual claims, sparking a debate that was curtailed only by the onset of World War I.10 There is a great deal that can be found in common between this episode in Aikhenvald’s career and the inclusion in Nabokov’s The Gift of “The Life of Chernyshevsky.” which enjoys its own succès de scandale within the novel’s pages (“the book found itself surrounded by a good, thundery atmosphere of scandal which helped sales”).11 But the chapter failed to produce the same effect for the novel itself, for a variety of reasons—not least of which was its suppression by Sovremmennye zapiski, an act of censorship to which Nabokov vehemently objected.12 It is likely that in his Chernyshevsky chapter Nabokov was—alongside several other artistic and theoretical goals—making a private tribute to Aikhenvald in his factual yet disparaging demythologization of one of the titans of early socialist activism. (The critic was killed by a streetcar on his way home from a party in his honor at the Nabokovs’ apartment in Berlin.) The curious fact that Aikhenvald’s critique was published, unlike Godunov-Cherdyntsev/Nabokov’s, tells its own little story about the limits of svoboda slova in the émigré community.
Although no one would call The Gift a scandalous novel, it is noteworthy that it includes the second or even third instar of the Lolita idea, in Boris Shchyogolev’s fanciful notion, sketched out for Fyodor, of writing a novel about a man who marries a widow in order to pursue her daughter.13 That theme mutated into The Enchanter (written in 1939), Nabokov’s last complete Russian narrative, but it is perhaps not surprising that it had to wait several years—almost a decade—before he would return to it in English (although it is echoed in the character of Mariette in Bend Sinister). It would seem that Nabokov needed first to establish himself as a respectable writer, as an artist; Lolita would not do as the novel introducing a new author to the American scene. Shock, to be effective, needs the appropriate preparation, and if Nabokov intended to push the boundaries of what was representable in art, he also meant to preserve his unquestioned role as a practitioner of the highest artistic standards.
There are, of course, other plausible reasons for the delay besides considerations of timing or image: Failing to publish The Enchanter (it was rejected by Sovremennye zapiski14) might have pushed the theme to the back of Nabokov’s creative agenda; after all, he was simultaneously working on volume two of The Gift, which would metamorphose into the unfinished Solus Rex and finally into varying fragments in Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Pale Fire.15 The war and the Holocaust (to which Nabokov lost a brother, but escaped with his Jewish wife and son) also intervened. In other words, creative and personal considerations likely played the main roles in Lolita’s postponement: moreover, as Boyd contends, the novel’s theme required extensive development from its incunabular form in The Enchanter16 However that may be, in all likelihood a novel like Lolita would not have afforded Nabokov the most auspicious entrée into American letters. The novel was hard enough to publish even after he had established a respectable name and a fifteen-year record of publishing in the U.S.
Nevertheless, it may be plausible to contemplate Lolita as a particular solution to the problem of how to attract attention to high art in an era with so many forms of light entertainment available, not to mention the rise of radio and television as mass-market entertainment phenomena.
We can date the first known statement Nabokov made of a concern for publicity to the aforementioned reference to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1941; the next such expression to be found in materials currently available to researchers came in 1950, when, in a letter to John Fischer, of Harper & Brothers, Nabokov made several suggestions about the promotion of Conclusive Evidence, mentioning such ideas as book clubs, pre-publication excerpts in Harper’s, announcements, and also his concern that some of this should happen before Christmas, as “Santa Claus is putting on his jackboots”17—a telling phrase, considering Nabokov’s consistent association of jackboots with tyrannical regimes. One can also detect in the serial publication of chapters from Conclusive Evidence an effort to capitalize on heightened American interest in the Soviet Union following the war; the project first appears in a letter of 1946 to Kenneth McCormick, of Doubleday, in which Nabokov calls it “a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel. . . . It will be a sequence of short essay-like bits, which suddenly gathering momentum will form into something very weird and dynamic.”18 Later, Nabokov was well aware from the literature classes he taught at Cornell that there was significant interest in Russia and its cultural heritage, and as the Cold War deepened he considered writing for The New Yorker about Soviet anti-American propaganda.19
In 1950, as Conclusive Evidence was nearing completion, he asked The New Yorker’s Katharine White to suggest a literary agent for him, noting his frustration with the low sales figures of his books to date: “All my previous books have been such dismal financial flops in this country that I don’t trust the pure fate of unaided books any more.” 20 Later, he was equally dissatisfied with Harper’s efforts on behalf of Conclusive Evidence, as he told Pascal Covici in 1954, and in two separate letters he insisted on a large “publicity budget” for Pnin before the manuscript had even been read by the publisher.21 To a great extent, Nabokov felt that despite the quality of his works, they were not selling enough to compensate for his low salary at Cornell (his take-home pay was $4,170 in the 1948–49 academic year, or about $39,059 in 2011 dollars,22 and had actually gone down in real terms by 1952, to $4,450 ($36,803 in 2011 dollars); he put his expenses at $5,840 ($48,302) that year, due to the college-tuition costs of his son, Dmitri). He would have to take promotional matters into his own hands, despite being “no businessman.”23
Concerned about delays in Lolita’s U.S. publication, he suggested that “the interest of ‘the reading public’ may wane”—demonstrating a keen awareness of the economic power of fads and the herd mentality.24 Nabokov’s eager and canny engagement with the film industry addressed itself to the publicity benefits of cinema; he seems (before he became involved in the screenplay) temporarily to have been unconcerned with the actual quality of the proposed movie: “For one thing, my supreme, and in fact only, interest in these motion picture contracts is money. I don’t give a damn for what they call ‘art,’ ” he wrote to Walter Minton.25 Whether or not he cared for art in the cinematic sense, he knew that the larger the Lolita sensation became, the more it would carry his name and his literary work to an ever-widening audience. That the movie significantly tamed and changed the novel’s content was not so important; what was important was that it kept him in the spotlight for as long as possible. He knew well enough what it felt like to be ignored.
To the extent that Lolita served as his best publicity coup—perhaps to a greater extent than even he could have imagined (despite his observation that “all this ought to have happened thirty years ago” 26)—the novel became a turning point in his own promotional career as well. In the decades preceding his fame, Nabokov relied on publishing short stories, essays, poems, translations, and critical works to give his name extra visibility among intellectuals. Once he became a celebrity, an entirely new marketing opportunity presented itself, one very much in tune with Nabokov’s own tastes: As interviewers sought him out as the author of Lolita and the books that followed, he could refine and present a persona that would in itself be a subject of interest for his readers and the general public—in his own words, he could “construct in the presence of my audience the semblance of what I hope is a plausible and not altogether displeasing personality.”27 This persona amounted to a collection of principled positions—some deeply held, some more or less performed—that could be dramatized and verbalized in highly entertaining ways. (One sees in this role more of Nabokov’s affinity with Aikhenvald, whom he had called “a man with a tender soul and firm principles” 28—a description phrase anticipating Nabokov’s own Strong Opinions.)
As Nabokov certainly knew that many of his opinions were at odds with common intellectual preferences and commonsense proclivities, he could rely on his statements to generate their own bit of shock value. A brilliant actor,29 Nabokov used the interviews to become his own advertising campaign, and consistent with the theatrical mood (but also with his desire to control his image carefully), he soon made sure that the interviews were perfectly scripted and never spontaneous—a fact he does not hide, and even seems to delight in revealing in Strong Opinions. This control served multiple purposes: It protected his privacy by letting him define the terms of discussion; it allowed him to shape his public image apart from his books; and it perpetuated curiosity about the “man behind the mystification.” And since the interviews he gave in the process of conjuring this persona were both entertaining and distinct, Nabokov could collect several of them into a book (with several other pieces of his critical and scientific prose thrown in). Whether or not one agrees with his assessment that his interviews could not “encourage the sales” of his books30—he had more confidence in pure advertising—this strategy was a very efficient way of turning a marketing campaign into a marketable product, and it also gave him a venue for demonstrating and discussing his scientific alter ego, the lepidopterist. What is especially striking is that Nabokov already clearly saw the commodity value of many of his peripheral activities even while he pursued them: this was equally true of his Cornell lectures (before his fame) and of his epistolary exchanges with Edmund Wilson.31 Once he had the attention of the highbrow audience, he was ready with a decades-in-the-making backlog of material to feed its desire for wit and enchantment.
In some ways, his tussle with Wilson after the publication of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin translation and commentary played right into Nabokov’s desire for their letters to be published as a book. A better marketing strategy hardly could have been devised on purpose, but in this case, Wilson’s very critical review of his friend’s translation—for which he had helped secure Guggenheim funding!—was an unsurpassable pretext for the staging of a fantastic public row filled with verbal fireworks.32 What could be better than a war of words between two of the day’s most renowned literary figures? In his main rebuttal, “Nabokov’s Reply,” Nabokov undertakes to refute “practically every item of criticism” in Wilson’s review, here again echoing Aikhenvald’s point-by-point response to critics of his Belinsky essay.33 It was, he said, “a polemicist’s dream come true.” Boyd calls Wilson’s review “willfully peevish,” filled with “seething animosity,” and claims that Nabokov’s sense of honor would not have allowed him to refrain from answering the challenge. (Yet Boyd also suggests that “Wilson seemed to feel that his criticism had been simply robust frankness rather than vicious hostility.”34) It may also be that Wilson thought himself fully up to the challenge of a public sparring match with Nabokov. On the one hand, it was a question of honor; on the other, the exchange (which Nabokov could not lose, given his superior armaments) would heighten publicity for Eugene Onegin (one is reminded of the scene from The Gift in which Fyodor sees his rival, the poet Koncheyev, with an angelic smile, apparently reading a spurious attack on his poetry by “Christopher Mortus,” whereupon Fyodor becomes frustrated “that no one wrote about him like that”)35—not that Onegin could ever have been viewed as a moneymaker.
It would be grossly unfair, however, to question the sincerity of Nabokov’s counterattack or to suggest that it was launched solely or even primarily for its publicity value. Indeed, it would have been uncharacteristic for him to hold his peace, as can be discerned from his earlier letters to various editors on topics such as Russian history, Soviet policy, and even the quality of Russian instruction at Cornell. If nothing else, Wilson’s reference to Nabokov’s “sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre” must have seemed unbelievably offensive and personal to Nabokov, justifying the most brutal and merciless response.36 Wilson knew of Nabokov’s deep antipathies to Dostoevsky and Sartre, and his comment could only have been intended to infuriate. At the same time, Nabokov’s reply to Wilson is shaped much more by its value as publicity and even as commodity than were his earlier public jeers. Boyd calls his riposte “devastating” and “unsparing”; it is also exquisitely crafted, dramatic, and exhilarating.37
However, the most important factor in this whole saga is Nabokov’s desire to defend the integrity and reputation of his scholarly achievement. When it came to his creative works, Nabokov tried to control texts, book covers, and translations as fully as possible and let the art of the writing speak for itself (something his forewords and postscripts do not impede). When it came to scholarship, Nabokov had to defend his methods and his findings just as anyone else would. Had he left Wilson’s critique unanswered, the reputation of his Onegin would have suffered, at least among those who took Wilson’s word for it. Needless to say, in this case those ignorant of the merits of the translation would far outnumber the knowledgeable. Nabokov hardly could have expected that very many of Lolita’s readers in the U.S.—or anywhere, for that matter—would have the skills to evaluate or even the motivation to read his Onegin translation and commentary. Knowing that this work would remain something more talked about than it was read, regulating public perceptions about it was a major concern—especially in view of the project’s importance to him. He even admits to some cunning in this regard. Of his choice of the English word “sapajous” to translate obez’yana, he relates, “I was also looking forward to somebody’s pouncing on that word and allowing me to retaliate with that wonderfully satisfying reference.” 38 Which is not to say that Nabokov planted obscurities solely to trap overconfident critics, but he clearly knew in advance that they would serve such a purpose. He guessed that his literal approach to translation would be attacked and that he would have to defend it with all his rhetorical skill. It was, and he did; as a result, his Onegin became one of the most debated translations of all time (which is very strange when one considers his modest purpose of providing a literal “crib”). If the extreme methodology—the uglier the better!—was meant to assure that his work would not go unnoticed and that Pushkin’s novel would become more widely known in the English-speaking world, it surely hit its mark.
If interviews, rivalries, and iconoclastic translations offered a chance to create a range of intellectual offerings, the backlog of his yet-to-be-translated Russian novels, stories, and plays—which Nabokov had been trying to have translated and published since well before he arrived in the U.S.—was available to keep Nabokov in the limelight, filling in the gaps of time when he was working on new novels or revising his memoir. Thus Invitation to a Beheading was translated by his son, Dmitri, and published in 1959, the same year as a rerelease of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Laughter in the Dark was revised and rereleased in 1960; The Gift in 1963; The Defense in 1964; The Eye in 1965; Despair and The Waltz Invention (plays) in 1966; Mary in 1970; Glory in 1971; and story collections in 1958, 1974, 1975, and 1976. These were interspersed with reissues of other works in English, the Eugene Onegin project, Strong Opinions, and four new novels written in English, so that one really could call Nabokov a virtual industry from 1958 on. This frenetic activity created real excitement among the reading public, who were more accustomed to serious literature by a single author appearing gradually. It was as if Nabokov had to make up for thirty-five years of having been neglected. As D. Barton Johnson has written, “most authors who enjoy a major commercial success are faced with the difficult task of producing new work before public interest fades.” 39 Nabokov did not have to face that difficulty. If anything, it could be that the aggressive publication schedule caused his star to burn too bright and too brief, since, as Boyd reports, Details of a Sunset and Other Stories in 1976 “did not catch the public’s eye,” in part because its publisher, McGraw Hill, was no longer highly motivated to publicize his works.40 Boyd reports that twenty-nine volumes in English were published by Nabokov between 1962 and 1976—more than two per year. Regardless of the works’ quality, at such a pace of release, audience fatigue is an understandable consequence. However, even if a slower tempo might have been a better publicity strategy, someone with Nabokov’s desire to have perfect control over the physical formats of his entire oeuvre—in English at the very least—was sure, at the age of sixty, that he couldn’t count on having thirty more years to achieve his aim.
There is a special irony in the seething pace of translating and republishing in the years following Lolita. His new fame and wealth allowed Nabokov to retire from teaching and devote himself completely to literature for the first time in his life, but the tasks of overseeing translations into English and other languages, along with completing the revisions of Onegin and Speak, Memory, and translating Lolita into Russian, probably left him less time than ever for new creative work. Tellingly, the pace of his new literary output did not increase from the 1950s, and remained far less than what he had done in the furious ’30s, which saw the publication of six novels (Glory, Laughter in the Dark, The Eye, Despair, Invitation to a Beheading, and The Gift) and many stories, as well as the completion of manuscripts for The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and The Enchanter, and “Father’s Butterflies,” and the beginnings of the second volume of The Gift. One wonders whether it was a difficult choice to favor the reproduction of old works into English at the expense of the creation of new ones. If, as he said to Alden Whitman in 1971, his own “life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of boyhood and youth,” 41 then perhaps he did not feel a need to create more than he did, or to do so more quickly. Nevertheless, the unfulfilled promise of Speak on, Memory! and The Original of Laura is a cause for regret, at least among Nabokov’s most devoted readers.
The main theme that emerges from an overview of Nabokov’s publishing career is not money, but control. Control of his image, his texts, his privacy, his scholarly reputation—these are the aims that stand out among the various ways he participated in the production and marketing of his books. His insistent letters about what might appear on the covers of various books (“no girls”) and what kinds of promotional language were appropriate to appear on the backs (no “friendly plugs,” no Wilson, no Pasternak) indicate the atmosphere he wanted to have surround his novels.
This question of image control blends into another question of more concern to literary critics: the idea of control over his texts’ reception and interpretation by readers, or even of control over the readers themselves. What has been called the author’s tyranny can be seen in his forewords and the interviews as well as the fabric of the works, which produce such intricacy and seem, from one point of view, to leave nothing to chance, with no room for the reader’s “freedom.” There is little doubt that during his life and for two decades after his death, Nabokov’s intrusions into the world of his own reception caused critics to behave in ways that appeared to have been heavily influenced by anxiety about the master’s approval, real or imagined.42 There has been continued interest in the way Nabokov’s interviews and forewords might cajole or bully readers into adopting or avoiding particular reading strategies and the way the works themselves seem structured to achieve precise and unique interpretations, like a chess problem with a single key.43 Are his readers “galley slaves,” like his characters?44 It seems unlikely. Nabokov may have created some of the most overdetermined fiction in the history of literature, but that has not stopped readers from discovering connections and meanings that the author did not intend. Notably, Nabokov did not reject all such unintended findings. As he wrote to Carl R. Proffer, “many of the delightful combinations and clues, though quite acceptable, never entered my head or are the result of an author’s intuition and inspiration, not calculation and craft. Otherwise why bother at all—in your case as well as mine.” 45 Likewise, “the good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled.” 46
As far as I know, no one has ever asked what it would tell us about Nabokov’s philosophical principles if this kind of control, this kind of absolute, unfailing intentionality, were really his aim. Can Nabokov have believed in a world in which his artistic meanings were fixed, permanent and immutable, for endlessly repeating identical perceptions by readers? Can his jokes about writing for the person he saw in the mirror, for an audience of readers wearing his own mask, really imply that he wished for a world filled with clones of himself? Actually, it sounds more like a deliberately distorted, parodic narcissism than it does an effective plan for tyranny. Nabokov’s character Fyodor refers to a “final dictatorship over words,” which in his recent book were still “trying to vote.” 47 However, a dictatorship over words is very different from tyranny over meanings, critics, readers, or anything else. Words are the base-level material of the verbal artist. In their purest form, as (meaningful) sounds, they are perhaps the only things over which an author has total control (ignoring all of the psychological elements that might influence choice, for the time being): A word, as a combination of sounds and meanings, can be chosen and forced to stand in a particular place. But the fictitional Koncheyev chides Fyodor for having “an excessive trust in words” 48—and perhaps he is arguing that Fyodor seems to think that words communicate more transparently and effectively than really they do.
Nabokov does not seem to have shared Fyodor’s naïveté, at least not in his mature prose period, if he ever did. Meanings of words and identities of characters consistently are elusive or multivalent in Nabokov. His deliberate choice of arcane terminology and lexical rarities of astounding precision may be a sign of nostalgia for the loss of that trust in words, and a reminder that precision of that sort is exceptional—not at all the rule. The choice of obscure terms could also be viewed as expressive of anxiety over words’ ambiguity. By extension, their use could be seen simply as rare peaks of conscious achievement, where word and referent seem perfectly matched, to a degree that happens only once in a while. The same might be said of Nabokov’s exquisite sentences. They give readers an intimation of achievable perfection, of how language can capture and communicate a fact or a feeling exactly. Yet, most likely, that perfection falls out of reach as soon as it is represented. The sense of perfect representation is an illusion generated by perfect aesthetic form combined perhaps with expressive novelty—the surprise of a new experience. Art lovers are readily seduced by the force of aesthetic perfection, but they still sense the gap between an experienced reality and its verbal evocation.
In what might be seen as a variant of the tyranny motif, Nabokov also made repeated use of the author-deity analogy, in reference to entire artworks, and this comparison may be more closely indicative of how he perceived his authorial role in relation to complete works released into the world of readers. Whether as God’s “little plagiarist” or rival to “the Almighty” or impersonating an “anthropomorphic deity,” 49 Nabokov’s role within his created worlds is supreme—and yet, just as he valued freedom within human life in the natural world (even a world with an “Almighty”), his vision allows for freedom of a sort within his created worlds as well.
Nabokov’s management of his literary affairs amounts to a disciplined attempt to control several tracks of his artistic career at once, to keep them all in proper balance. Like Aikhenvald, he was a champion of the individual and not afraid to make unpopular views known and thus stir up controversy. Concerned simultaneously about his work’s perfection, financial success, and reputation, he tempered his desire for extensive publicity by his insistence on a certain kind of mood and level of taste and quality. His publication of Lolita and his demand that any publisher of the novel should be willing to defend it all the way to the Supreme Court50 helped to broaden the American conception of the boundaries of art. He gave many interviews, but he did not accept honorary degrees or sign autographs. He oversaw the translation of his entire Russian oeuvre into English in order to ensure maximal clarity of his intent to anglophone readers. Within his art, he made his creations as detailed and tightly structured as he could, but still left room for “intuition and inspiration,” that of both his readers and himself. In short, we see on Nabokov’s part a dizzying array of intentional activities designed to benefit himself, his readers, and the culture of the country where he held citizenship. Nabokov certainly did turn his creative gifts into an industry, one that continues to enrich the lives of readers in the countries where he had homes, as well as in those where he was homeless.
An earlier, shorter version of this essay was published in a somewhat flawed translation as “Nabokov, Knigoizdatel” in Yuri Leving, ed. Imperiia N. Nabokov i nasledniki. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006, 74–84.] Some of the translation errors were the fault of my own oversights. The current version should be considered definitive.
1 John Glad, Russia Abroad: Writers, History, Politics (Washington, D.C., and Tenafly, NJ: Birchbark Press & Hermitage Publishers, 1999), 106.
2 Ibid., 155.
3 See “Zelenaia lampa, beseda IV,” in Iurii Terapiano, ed., Vstrechi (New York: Chekhov House, 1953), 57–58.
4 Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940–1977, Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich/Bruccoli-Clark-Layman, 1989), 149
5 Ibid., 38
6 Ibid., 38
7 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 7.
8 July 18, 1955; Nabokov, Selected Letters, 175.
9 February 3, 1954; ibid., 144.
10 See “Belinskii,” in Iulii Aikhenvald, Siluety russkikh pisatelei (Moskva: Terra-Knizhnyi klub, Respublika, 1998), 199–207; and Spor o Belinskom, ibid., 252–286. For a list of reviews of Aikhenvald’s essay, see A. Reitblat, “ ‘Podkolodnyi estet’ s miagkoi dushoi i tverdymi pravilami: Iulii Aikhenvald na rodine i v emigratsii,” in M. Parkhomovskii, sostavitel’, Evrei v kul’ture russkogo zarubezh’ia. Sbornik statei, publikatsii, memuarov, i esse. Vypusk 1. 1919-1939 (Bet-Shemesh, Israel, 1992), 35–54: p. 53, n. 30.
11 The Gift, 309. Vladimir Nabokov, Dar, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh (Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2000), Vol. 4, 482–3.
12 The chapter’s appearance fourteen years after the rest of the novel meant that the novel was no longer new or, perhaps, newsworthy, and the émigré community was completely dispersed by that point, in any case. See the exchange between Nabokov and Sovremennye zapiski editor Vadim Rudnev in The Nabokovian, and Gennady Barabtarlo’s discussion “Nabokov’s Chernyshevski in Contemporary Annals,” The Nabokovian 24 (1990): 15–23.
13 The first was Margot in Laughter in the Dark, and the second, Emmie in Invitation to a Beheading
14 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 514.
15 Boyd, American Years, 520; Aleksandr Dolinin, “Zagadka nedopisannogo romana,” Zvezda 12 (1997).
16 Boyd, Russian Years, 523.
17 Nabokov, Selected Letters, 107. A definitive chronology would require examination of all Nabokov’s unpublished letters, something not undertaken for this project.
18 September 22, 1946; ibid., 69. Aside from “Mademoiselle O” in 1936 (in French) and 1943 (English), its first installment (“Portrait of My Uncle”) was published in 1948. Boyd, American Years, 685n.37.
19 Nabokov, Selected Letters, 96, 106, 108.
20 Ibid., 96.
21 Ibid., 144, 178.
22 Ibid., 89 and 130.
23 Ibid., 235.
24 Ibid., 232.
25 Ibid., 261.
26 Ibid., 259.
27 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1989 [1973]), 158.
28 “Chelovekom miagkoi dushi i tverdykh pravil”; Vladimir Nabokov, Drugie berega, in Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh (Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2000), Vol. 5, 318.
29 See quote from Martha Updike in Boyd, American Years, 173.
30 Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 158.
31 Boyd, American Years, 172, and Nabokov, Selected Letters, 357–358.
32 Edmund Wilson, “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965: 3-6.
33 Vladimir Nabokov, “Nabokov’s Reply,” in Selected Letters, 496.
34 Boyd, American Years, 499.
35 The Gift, 169; Dar, 348.
36 New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965
37 However, there may have been a deliberate affectionate undercurrent in Nabokov’s description of Wilson’s efforts to pronounce Russian words. At a recent literary conference in Auckland, I was informed by Gennady Barabtarlo that Pushkin, attempting to speak English, garbled it so badly that Zakhar Chernyshev, upon hearing Pushkin read Shakespeare aloud, burst out laughing, asking the poet, “But what language are you reading in?” Pushkin also exploded in laughter, explaining that he had taught himself English, but read it as if it were Latin. Mikhail Yuzevich, “?????? ???????.” If Wilson’s reading aloud of Eugene Onegin really had them “both in stitches,” Nabokov may well have found a charming precursor of that episode in Yuzevich’s anecdote. It seems unlikely that Wilson would have caught the allusion, however, unless Nabokov had recounted to him the Pushkin story during one of their meetings. ?.?. ?????? ? ????????????? ?????????????. ? 2-? ?????. Moscow: 1998: v. 2, 114.
38 Vladimir Nabokov, “Reply to My Critics,” Strong Opinions, 256, orig. in Encounter, Feb. 1966.
39 D. Barton Johnson, “Nabokov in the Sixties,” in David J. Larmour, ed., Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 139–149: 141.
40 Boyd, American Years, 654.
41 Strong Opinions, 177.
42 Zoran Kuzmanovich’s “The Fine Fabric of Deceit: Nabokov and His Readers,” was the first extended treatment of this topic. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1988.
43 As part of a growing resistance to this view, Jacqueline Hamrit has recently written that despite these controlling gestures, in the end Nabokov “effaces himself” and makes space for the creative reader. Presented at “Nabokov Upside Down,” International Nabokov Conference at Auckland, New Zealand, January 10-13. Draft kindly provided by the author.
44 Strong Opinions, 95.
45 Selected Letters, 391.
46 Strong Opinions, 183.
47 The Gift, Vintage International, 364.
48 Ibid., 339.
49 Strong Opinions, (New York: Vintage International, 1990, 32); Letter to Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, October 13, 1925 (Berg Collection, Correspondence); “Foreword,” in Bend Sinister (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974, xii).
50 Selected Letters, 219.