Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism

Nabokov’s Art of Memory

and European Modernism

Nabokov’s Art of Memory

and European Modernism

John Burt Foster, Jr.

Princeton University Press · Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Foster, John Burt, 1945–

Nabokov’s art of memory and European modernism / John Burt Foster, Jr.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-691-06971-9

1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Criticism and

interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Europe. 3. European

literature—History and criticism. 4. Autobiographical memory in

literature. I. Title.

PG3476.N3Z666 1993

813′.54—dc20 92-24040

This book has been composed in Bitstream Transitional 521

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and meet the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity

of the Council on Library Resources

Most of Chapter 3 was published as "Nabokov Before Proust: The Paradox of Anticipatory

Memory," in a forum edited by Dale Peterson for the Slavic and East European Journal 33

(1989): 78–93. Copyright AATSEEL of the U.S., Inc. Reprinted by permission.

An earlier version of the epilogue appeared as "Not T. S. Eliot, But Proust: Revisionary

Modernism in Nabokov’s Pale Fire," Comparative Literature Studies 28, no. 1 (1991): 51–67.

Copyright 1991 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of The

Pennsylvania State University Press.

A somewhat different version of Chapter 6 appeared as "An Archeology of ‘Mademoiselle O’:

Narrative Between Art and Memory," in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short

Fiction, edited by Charles Nicol and Gennadi Alexis Barabtarlo (New York: Garland, 1992),

pp. 134–63. Copyright 1992 by Garland Publishing. Reprinted by permission.

Excerpts from East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding in Four Quartets,

copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by

permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Excerpt from A Prayer for My Daughter from The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: Vol. I:

The Poems, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing

Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, reprinted by permission of Macmillan

Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents Jane Armour and John Burt Foster

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Note on Citations

Part One: Points of Departure

1. The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography

2. The Self-Defined Origins of an Artist of Memory

From Synesthesia to the Two Master Narratives

Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and the Discourse of Modernity

3. The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory: From Mary to The Defense and Glory (1925–1930)

Part Two: Toward France

4. Encountering French Modernism: Kamera Obskura (1931–1932)

5. From the Personal to the Intertextual: Dostoevsky and the Two-Tiered Mnemonic System in Despair (1932–1933)

6. Narrative between Art and Memory: Writing and Rewriting Mademoiselle O (1936–1967)

7. Memory, Modernism, and the Fictive Autobiographies

Recollected Emotion in Spring in Fialta (1936–1947)

The Covert Modernism of The Gift (1934–1937)

Part Three: In English

8. Cultural Mobility and British Modernism: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister (1938–1946)

9. Autobiographical Images: The Shaping of Speak, Memory (1946–1967)

10. The Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory

Epilogue: Proust over T. S. Eliot in Pale Fire (1962)

Notes

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book explores the pivotal role of memory in Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, stories, and autobiographical writings, focusing on the period from 1925 to 1950, but offering glimpses of later developments. At the same time it emphasizes how these narratives intersect with early twentieth-century modernism as an international movement. It is thus conceived both as a contribution to Nabokov criticism and as a case study in comparative literature, one that shows how a well-placed writer navigated among figures like Proust and Bergson in France, Freud and Mann in the German-speaking world, and Joyce and Eliot among Anglo-American high modernists. Key nineteenth-century precursors include Baudelaire and Nietzsche as early proponents of modernity along with Dostoevsky, a fellow Russian who had become a fixture on the modern European scene, and even Tolstoy and Pushkin, who are hardly ever mentioned in accounts of modernism. In relating the creative trajectory of one individual to a specific set of literary and intellectual circumstances, Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism explores the possibilities of what I shall call cultural biography.

The main accent in this phrase falls on the adjective cultural. Nabokov’s personal development is certainly fascinating, whether we think of his migrations from Russia through Europe to the United States, or of his metamorphoses from liberal aristocrat to émigré intellectual and then to media celebrity. But though I have profited from the biographical work on Nabokov, especially the new two-volume study by Brian Boyd, and though I have also learned from the work of Boris Eikhenbaum, Joseph Frank, and Ian Watt on other Slavic writers with Western connections, this book will subordinate Nabokov’s life as such to his leading accomplishment in the cultural sphere—his writings themselves. Even with this limitation, however, the range and complexity of Nabokov’s literary affiliations have prevented full coverage of his cultural situation, a mammoth project that would risk the fate of Sartre’s unfinished Flaubert biography. Thus my decision to emphasize Nabokov’s response to European modernism necessarily downplays other facets of his earlier career, such as his love for the nineteenth-century Russian classics, his response to the Silver Age literature of his youth, and his special character as a Russian émigré writer. By the same token, Nabokov’s memory-oriented narratives have claimed so much attention in their own right that they have overshadowed his important but less sustained accomplishments as a poet, playwright, translator, and entomologist. The focus on memory even tends to bypass the more fantastic, experimental kind of writing that first emerged in Invitation to a Beheading, written in 1934. But it does so only to give Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory the attention it deserves as a major achievement alongside his fiction.

Nabokov’s later career gives only limited insight into his developing responses to European modernism. Both the American novelist of Lolita and Pnin and the transnational expatriate of Ada make their appearance after midcentury, when Nabokov had already completed the first full version of his autobiography. This work, in summing up his life before he came to the United States in 1940, gives a last, culminating expression to his modernism of memory. As a result, only isolated episodes after 1950 will require detailed treatment, most notably his revision of the autobiography in the mid-1960s, the retrospective glimpses of European high culture in his Cornell lectures on literature and in Strong Opinions (1973), and the new outlook on modernism suggested by the interplay of Shade and Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962). Nabokov’s fiction from Lolita onward would require a second cultural biography emphasizing his many-sided response to the American scene and the nature of his participation in late twentieth-century postmodernism.

My title does not allude to Frances Yates’s well-known The Art of Memory; Nabokov apparently had no direct contact with the classical and Renaissance memory systems discussed in her book. Rather, the term art of memory proved a convenient and even unavoidable label for one key tendency in Nabokov’s memory-writing, his deliberate oscillation between fictive invention and mnemonic truth. This oscillation, when projected onto his choice of narrative modes, corresponds to the intricate interplay between his novels and stories on the one hand, and the different versions of his autobiography on the other. As a result, though this book does not rely exclusively on any one critical approach or theory, both its title and its basic organization reflect the enlarged significance of autobiography in contemporary literary study. I have also learned from the discussions of time and memory by narrative theorists like Gérard Genette and Dorrit Cohn; by the emergence of memory as a key issue on the deconstructive agenda; and by the Walter Benjamin revival, which has popularized a response to the French modernism of memory that contrasts revealingly with Nabokov’s. Because his art of memory centers on the mnemonic image, moreover, discussions of the verbal-visual problematic by W.J.T. Mitchell and others have alerted me to the importance of this issue both in Nabokov’s interpretations of his synesthetic literary gift and in his memory writings themselves.

Nabokov criticism is rich and varied, but it has tended to neglect Nabokov’s European connections in favor of his Russian or American ones. My response to previous work has therefore been somewhat selective, in the sense that although the scholarly corpus can often clarify specific matters of interpretation, only five rather diverse books have greatly influenced my approach. Predating yet anticipating the advent of Bakhtin and Kristeva, Alfred Appel’s Annotated Lolita (1970) impressively documents the range and complexity of Nabokov’s intertextual practices, which Appel conceptualizes as literary gamesmanship and involuted narration. His notes make it clear how much the cultural self-consciousness of Nabokov’s own writings can impart about his literary world, an approach Appel then applies to another area of culture in Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (1974). Later on, Simon Karlinsky’s edition of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979) revealed to readers the lively give-and-take between these two close observers of international modernism. By demonstrating the uniqueness and force of his perspective on the early twentieth century, Nabokov’s side of the correspondence helped launch the present project.

Particularly useful in defining the topic were the rigorous close readings in D. Barton Johnson’s Worlds in Regression (1985), to my mind the best detailed study of Nabokov’s works in themselves. Johnson was so successful in arguing a self-reflexive, gnostic trend from Invitation to a Beheading, through the Solus Rex project around 1940, to Pale Fire and beyond that he opened the way to studying other, equally decisive issues in Nabokov’s career. Hence my current interest in Nabokov’s paradoxical modernism of memory, which surfaced in his earliest novels, developed rapidly during a creative surge in the 1930s, persisted through a later period of extreme cultural mobility, and finally led to the completed autobiography. Priscilla Meyer’s work has also intrigued me, despite her controversial view of Lolita as a disguised reworking of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Her interest in correspondences and syntheses among various strands in Nabokov’s multicultural personality, shown more fully in her recent book on Pale Fire (Find What the Sailor Has Hidden, 1988), stimulated my own cross-cultural research. Just as fruitful, at a later stage, was Paul John Eakin’s Fictions in Autobiography (1985); though not directly concerned with Speak, Memory, it closes with an eloquent tribute to Nabokov that encouraged my efforts to fathom the fact-fiction problematic in his work.

With regard to modernism, my basic outlook probably still reflects the thrill of working with Richard Ellmann and especially Charles Feidelson, Jr., soon after publication of The Modern Tradition. In spotlighting the paradox of a tradition against itself, the title of their anthology no doubt alerted me to similar paradoxes in Nabokov. And memories of Charles Feidelson’s puzzlement with Eliot’s curt response to "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," when he was asked to comment on this seminal essay in the anthology, remained with me as I probed Nabokov’s own dissatisfaction with Eliot. But on the whole the panoramic overview offered by The Modern Tradition differs sharply from Nabokov’s strikingly intimate encounters with modernist culture. As will be shown, his art of memory mobilizes literary reminiscences along with immediate recollections of the past; and this intertextual factor means that when Nabokov self-consciously assembles a context for his writing, modernist culture itself enters his works as something that he directly emulates, amplifies, or attacks. Here Nabokov’s practice closely parallels the insights of certain Russian formalists, most notably Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov, as well as the dialogical theories of culture proposed by his close contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. This intertextual internalization of a specific literary world is crucial for understanding Nabokov’s slant on early twentieth-century European culture. Another key influence in approaching this period has been the debates about artistic modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde extending from Paul de Man to Jürgen Habermas and including literary historians like Matei Calinescu, Ihab Hassan, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Ricardo Quinones, and Charles Russell. In addition, current interest in canon formation obviously applies to Nabokov, whose career coincided with the academic acceptance of modernism and whose vehement objections to certain great names have become notorious.

To some extent Nabokov’s Art of Memory continues the cross-cultural study of literary modernism that I began in Heirs to Dionysus. Just as Nietzsche was a major forerunner who holds up a lens to an interconnected group of European novels from 1900 to 1947, so Nabokov was a well-placed latecomer whose art of memory pulls together a network of modernists in several literatures. But except at the very beginning of his career, Nabokov had little contact with Nietzschean modernism. He did not think much of Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, or André Malraux, while in Pnin the egregious Budo von Falternfels, who takes over the hero’s office, owes his triumph to studying the influence of Nietzsche’s disciples on Modern Thought (Pn 138). Thus, though Nabokov is just as international as Nietzsche, he highlights some very different tendencies within the modernist movement. For when he denounces myth or depth psychology, he is decidedly anti-Dionysian; but he exceeds even Nietzsche in his commitment to individuality and the literary image. Yet at the same time, despite his distrust of general ideas in literature, he certainly has more respect for the conscious mind.

Despite these oppositions, I will not argue for the superiority of either Nabokovian or Nietzschean modernism. Rather, I have aimed to be as precise as possible in delineating the inner logic of Nabokov’s position. His likes and dislikes in twentieth-century culture may seem offensive in Strong Opinions, but once we understand his evolving concerns as an artist of memory, they turn out to signify more than mere prejudice. The same effort to be judicious has informed my discussions of Nabokov’s even harsher quarrels with figures like Dostoevsky, Freud, and Eliot. To reconstruct a given conjuncture of life and culture in its particularity, the cultural biographer must learn to live with finding old favorites under siege.

The three sections of Nabokov’s Art of Memory follow a conceptual-chronological order. The first section, called Points of Departure, begins with a chapter that situates Nabokov’s European interests within his career as a whole, then discusses the literary-historical and methodological premises of a cultural biography focused on modernism. The second chapter examines how Nabokov accounts for his art of memory within a series of self-interpretations of his creative gift from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. These interpretations range from the synesthetic phenomenon of colored hearing to the two master narratives of the French governess and the summer of love. But they also involve the paradox of tying his mood of modernity to personal memories of the past. This linkage, which the young Nabokov traced back to Nietzsche and Baudelaire, functions as the underlying assumption for his modernism of memory. In the third chapter, which shifts from Nabokov’s general sense of his career to his actual beginnings as a Russian émigré novelist, attention turns to his first narratives concerned with memory. In them he formulates and then rejects a doctrine of anticipatory memory that is ambiguously Russo-European in its cultural affiliations, and that suggests an incipient futurism against which his later works will recoil.

The titles of the other two sections chart Nabokov’s changing course within European culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Toward France focuses on Nabokov’s explosive development during most of the 1930s, beginning with his initial response to Proust and Bergson’s French modernism in the early 1930s, most notably in an illuminating parody that is now unavailable in English. Discussion then turns in Chapter 5 to the much more ambitious Dostoevsky parody in Despair (written in 1932), which systematically integrates the intertextual into Nabokov’s art of memory and settles accounts with the main Russian obstacle to his emerging French slant in modernist fiction. The next chapter deals with Mademoiselle O (1936), one of Nabokov’s two publications in French and the much-revised first installment of the book-length autobiography that would come fifteen years later; it treats both the evolving interplay between fiction and autobiography in various versions of this work and the emergence of a more nuanced response to French modernism. The seventh chapter, on the fictive autobiographies of the later 1930s, examines how modernism intertwines with memory-writing in Nabokov’s favorite short story, Spring in Fialta, then shows how this story functions as a European pendant to Nabokov’s Russian émigré masterpiece, his novel The Gift.

The final section, In English, highlights Nabokov’s decision to start writing in that language in 1938, a transition usually taken to mark the emergence of an American Nabokov, but whose meaning for a European cultural biographer is much less clear-cut. For initially English pointed Nabokov toward England more than the United States. And if his British interests are obviously germane to this study, his burgeoning American connections represented for Nabokov a distinct, non-European alternative—an unexpected new option in his cross-cultural odyssey. In addition, whatever switching to English meant for his Russian émigré career, it failed to end his interests in European modernism. Quite the contrary, for after reviving a certain Anglophilia in his family background, Nabokov’s new language did not keep him from reaffirming the French roots of his art of memory.

The first chapter in this section lays the groundwork for these issues, which evolve over a longer period than Nabokov’s reception of Proust and Bergson. Dealing with his first two novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (written in 1938) and Bend Sinister (completed in 1946), Chapter 8 emphasizes his general sense of cultural mobility at a time of historical catastrophe, then considers his efforts to find a British setting for his modernism of memory. The next two chapters turn to the book whose very title seems to invoke Nabokov’s art of memory, the autobiography he would eventually call Speak, Memory. Discussion begins with the complex eloquence of the book’s mnemonic images, perhaps the most polished writing in Nabokov’s English-language career and the fulfillment of his long concern with literary image-making. Chapter 10 then turns to his cultural self-consciousness as he surveys his life story up to his departure for America and devises a more inclusive Russo-European persona to replace the English option explored in the two novels. Both of these chapters take account of Nabokov’s recently published Selected Letters, with their revelations about his changing plans for the autobiography. An epilogue on Pale Fire rounds out the discussion of Nabokov’s British interlude, since his treatment of T. S. Eliot and Proust in this experimental novel of the 1960s clarifies his preference for French over Anglo-American modernism.

At some level, no doubt, my approach to Nabokov reflects quirks of background and experience that ought to be mentioned. Unlike older or younger American readers, for whom either Lolita or Ada was decisive, my first strong impressions of Nabokov came in 1964, during a public reading of Pale Fire at Harvard University. Studying The Gift a year later in an eye-opening seminar for Russian majors convinced me of the importance of his émigré career. Within a year I had read everything I could get my hands on; and at a time when Nabokov’s oeuvre was growing at both ends, as John Updike put it, I found the earlier fiction just as compelling as the contemporary work. Full appreciation of Speak, Memory had to await the more recent surge of interest in autobiography.

In speculating about my special sensitivity to Nabokov’s art of memory and to his European side, I think first of boyhood summers among the lakes, pines, and birches of northern Minnesota. This landscape recalls the northern Russian setting for Nabokov’s two master narratives of memory—though it was left to Joseph Brodsky to identify the ecological echo. The transnational mosaic of cultures in the upper Midwest also held certain analogies with Nabokov’s Europe. The land of the Sioux and Chippewa gained a smattering of French place-names from early explorers, who were followed by immigrant settlers with their New Ulms, New Swedens, and New Pragues, all of which ended up as English-speaking towns. More than the political map of Europe at the time or the departmental divisions of American universities, this rich layering prepared me for the cross-cultural shifts and linkages in Nabokov’s response to modernism. Most fascinating of all was his ease in moving among cultures and languages, which chimed with my parents’ fabulous stories of life in China and Japan in the 1930s and with my long-forgotten experience of learning to talk in a bilingual environment. Now that I teach students from all over the world, the European Nabokov appears as a forerunner of our global sense of cultural mobility. But multiculturalism in his case would refer less to a social ideal of diversity than to the complex personal experience of forging a literary identity from several interacting and competing traditions.

Completion of this project would have been impossible without the support of several institutions and granting agencies. At Stanford University, where I first conceived of Nabokov’s Art of Memory, I am grateful to Herbert Lindenberger for encouraging me to take over his course on modernism, to George Dekker and Bill Todd for letting me teach the Russian classics, and to the Overseas Studies Program for sponsoring my French literature courses at the Stanford Program in Tours. Much of the early research was funded by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship with the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The following summer, a scholarship from the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University allowed me to study The Language of Images with W.J.T. Mitchell. I began the actual writing during a summer research grant from George Mason University, drafted most of the manuscript while holding a Fellowship for College Teachers from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and finished thanks to a Semester Study Grant from George Mason.

Over the years Herbert Lindenberger, Bill Todd, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, and John Malmstad have generously supported my research and writing, as have Jan Cohn, Terry Comito, and Hans Bergmann, my department chairs at George Mason. I also want to thank Edward Ahearn, Vladimir Alexandrov, Charlene Castellano, Mechthild Cranston, Robert Detweiler, Wendy Faris, Albert Guerard, Robert Hughes, Daniel Javitch, Douglas Langston, Diane Leonard, Angel Medina, Priscilla Meyer, David Minter, Henry Rutledge, Tom Smith, and Janet and Steven Walker, whose invitations to give lectures or present papers allowed me to try out my ideas. Along the way I received useful information and encouragement from many Nabokovians, including Alfred Appel, Jr., Gennadi Alexis Barabtarlo, Brian Boyd, D. Barton Johnson, Charles Nicol, Stephen Jan Parker, Dale Peterson, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. John DeMoss’s samizdat index of Strong Opinions helped me locate many well-remembered but otherwise elusive Nabokovian comments. My colleague Deborah Kaplan cogently commented on an early and all too sketchy draft, while my ex-colleague Michelle Massé helped pique my interest in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Elizabeth Beaujour, Douglas Berggren, Russell Berman, Ronald Bush, Arthur Evans, Irina Paperno, Naomi Ritter, Bernice Rosenthal, Arnold Weinstein, and Irving Wohlfarth also made valuable suggestions; and special thanks go to Harry Levin for sharing his memories of Nabokov despite a busy schedule. David Halliburton and Marcel Cornis-Pope gave me the benefit of detailed comments on the entire manuscript just before it went off to press, and I am grateful as well to Annette Theuring of Princeton University Press for her expert editorial assistance. Needless to say, none of these people is responsible for problems with the approach or the details.

Several libraries assisted me in the course of my research, most notably the Fenwick Library at George Mason but also the Georgetown University Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. Special credit goes to the Jane Bancroft Cook Library at New College in Sarasota, Florida, which not only aided me materially but has the unique Nabokovian cachet of being located some fifty miles south of St. Petersburg.

On a more personal note, I want to thank my brother-in-law, Dr. Thomas J. Dimino, for introducing me to word processing. Soraya Haider helped make it possible to write with a small child in the house, while Sophia (the small child) did much to brighten the rest of the day. My wife Andrea Dimino, as usual, offered both encouragement and forceful criticism; she also kept me alive to worlds beyond my research. In dedicating Nabokov’s Art of Memory to my parents, I recall many words of counsel and acts of assistance, but most of all those marvelous stories of eastern Asia that first sparked my enthusiasm for cross-cultural study.

Note on Citations

Abbreviations and page numbers in parentheses in the text and notes refer to frequently cited works by Nabokov. The abbreviations and their corresponding works are given below. All other references appear in the notes.

For works Nabokov wrote first in Russian and then had translated into English (often with revisions), I give page numbers for both editions, the Russian one first, followed by a slash and then the English reference. Thus (Dar 198/G 188) designates a passage to be found on page 198 of Dar, the Russian version of The Gift, and on page 188 of the subsequent English version.

In addition to decoding the abbreviations for Nabokov’s works, the following list provides all relevant bibliographical data:

Part One Points of Departure

Chapter 1

The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography

The European Nabokov remains an enigma. Readers throughout the English-speaking world remember the author of Lolita, of course, and how he burst onto the literary scene in the late 1950s. During the cultural ferment of the next decade, this retired professor, heavyset and genial in appearance yet holding acerbic literary opinions, became a name to conjure with. Somewhat like the new novelists in France, Nabokov—along with Borges, Barth, and Pynchon—was seen as the founder of an innovative trend in American fiction, a trend that was militantly antirealistic, disconcertingly self-conscious, and passionately devoted to style. It was even claimed that he heralded the rise of postmodernism as an epoch-making new departure in literature.¹ And there his image has remained, except for growing interest in his autobiography Speak, Memory and occasional reminders that his fiction does not in fact abandon such traditional concerns as plot, character, and moral insight.²

This Nabokov, however, is the American Nabokov. The figure one glimpses in old photographs projects another, much more fluid cultural identity. Here a lean sportsman in English clothes poses on the streets of Berlin; there a writer bends intently over a manuscript, amid French cigarettes and Russian dictionaries. Now a blurred face or receding hairline appears at a Russian émigré banquet for Bunin or with the editorial board of a Parisian literary journal; then a refugee from Hitler’s Europe stands before us, with haunted, defiant eyes.³ Such pictures summon up the unusually varied background of an author who, when he came to the United States in 1940, had survived the dizzying reversals of recent European history. As an adolescent during the heroic years of modern art, Nabokov started writing with the advantage of hindsight on its many new initiatives, and as he emulated, rejected, revised, or synthesized the elements of this legacy, he was superbly well equipped to respond cross-culturally. But he was also the victim of upheavals that drove him from country to country, making him a permanent exile who could only feel comfortable in rented houses or hotel rooms. From this stark contrast of intellectual opportunity and social disaster emerge the works that, when viewed through the prism of literary modernism, reveal the European Nabokov.

The younger Nabokov’s life, quickly rehearsed, reads like a capsule account of early twentieth-century Europe. He was born in 1899 to a privileged, belle époque family in prerevolutionary Russia; his father was a renegade aristocrat who defied the tsar and became an influential lawyer, journalist, and liberal politician. The household was Anglophile and well traveled; as a boy Nabokov knew English and French almost as well as Russian, and lived for periods in both France and Germany. When he got older, he came in contact with the rapid succession of Russian artistic movements that began with symbolism and led to the avant-garde. Later, in a possible half-conscious reference to this period, Nabokov chose Sirin as his literary pseudonym; this siren-like creature in Russian folklore might simply suggest an identification with art, but it had also been the name of a symbolist publishing house linked with major writers like Blok and Bely.⁴ Then, in 1917, the revolution came; Nabokov’s father, as a liberal, joined the provisional government that was formed in February after the abdication of Nicholas II. During the Bolshevik takeover in October the elder Nabokov was briefly arrested, then served in a local White government during the Russian Civil War, and later still was killed in Berlin by Russian monarchists seeking to assassinate a close political ally. His son, fiercely loyal to his father’s memory, would discover in Europe and America alike that the myth of the revolution had blotted out general knowledge of his father’s liberal opposition to both the tsar and Lenin.

In 1919, when Communist victory was obvious, the Nabokovs fled to Western Europe. They had lost most of their fortune and, though initially attracted to England, eventually decided to settle in Berlin, which had become a Russian émigré center and where the father edited a liberal newspaper until his death in 1922. The son, meanwhile, attended Cambridge University and began his serious literary apprenticeship by writing poetry. This period in the early 1920s was the high point of modernism in England, and Nabokov has reminisced about fellow students discussing Donne and Hopkins or Joyce’s Ulysses (DB 224).⁵ But he chose to do his own writing in Russian, addressing an émigré audience scattered across Europe; and so he took a different route to modern art.

On graduating from Cambridge Nabokov moved back to Berlin, where his attention soon turned to fiction. For fifteen years, from the Weimar period and the waning of expressionism well into the Nazi regime, he continued to live in Germany. He was often poor, and because his wife Vera was Jewish, both she and their infant son faced a growing threat of persecution. During this whole period Nabokov closely followed modern French literature, and made several visits to the sizable émigré community in Paris. Perhaps as a result, when he left Germany for good in 1937, he tried to reestablish himself in France. But in 1940, when it became clear that France would fall to Hitler, he had to flee again, this time to the United States. By then Nabokov had written eight novels in Russian and almost as many volumes of stories, poems, and plays; he was widely recognized as the best novelist among the émigré generation that came of age after the revolution.

These varied artistic and political experiences nourished a complex, multicultural identity in which Nabokov gloried. This identity is so complex, in fact, that we should abandon the dichotomy implied so far, that of a simple contrast between an American Nabokov and an earlier European one. Rather, to take a cue from Nabokov’s own view of his past, it makes better sense to think of three categories. Looking back at his life, he finds that it is marked by a rather pleasing chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia, the next twenty in Western Europe, and the twenty years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America (SO 52).⁶ Even this statement says nothing about the peculiarly deracinated, perhaps even transcultural period after 1960, when Nabokov lived in Switzerland as an American expatriate. For our purposes, however, we need only consider his view of the time before 1940. Far from just distinguishing Europe from the United States, it yields another broad contrast in which Nabokov’s boyhood and youth are Russian, while only the two decades of exile in England, Germany, and France are European. As this self-analysis suggests, we need to separate the European Nabokov not just from his later American self but from a Russian one as well.

Yet even this handy scheme is little more than a biographical rule of thumb. It is significant, of course, that Nabokov refuses to define Europe in terms of mutually exclusive national traditions; as befits someone who was born Russian, became an American, and at one point was a professor of comparative literature, he refers to it as a complex unit. But the movement from Russia to Europe to America, if viewed as a simple sequence, badly misrepresents the meaning of Europe within his cosmopolitan career. For if we wish to fathom an author’s cultural orientation, it makes more sense to focus on the writings rather than the life; and in that case our findings will depend on much more than an address. A given tendency can go back to an earlier period in the career, can coexist