Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Read online

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  Chronology

  1899

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov born on April 22, in St. Petersburg, Russia, the eldest child of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and Elena Ivanovna Nabokov. Raised in a cultured, wealthy family.

  1900

  Birth of brother, Sergey.

  1903

  Birth of sister, Olga.

  1906

  Birth of sister, Elena.

  1911–17

  Attends the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg.

  1911

  Birth of brother, Kirill.

  1916

  Death of uncle Vasily Rukavishnikov, who bequeaths his two thousand acre estate, “Rozhdestveno,” and the equivalent of two million dollars to Nabokov. Publication of Poems.

  1917

  Nabokov and brother Sergey flee from St. Petersburg amidst the Russian Revolution and settle in Southern Crimea.

  1918

  Publication of Almanac: Two Paths.

  1919

  The Red Army conquers Crimea as the Nabokov family sails from Sebastopol to Athens, and then to London.

  1919–22

  Studies Modern and Medieval Languages at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  1922

  His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, assassinated in Berlin on March 28. Graduates Cambridge with second-class honors degree. Became engaged to Svetlana Siewert in Berlin. Publication of VN’s translation of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon. Publication of The Cluster.

  1922–37

  Lives in Berlin, writes poems and novels in Russian. Supports himself by giving Russian, French, tennis and boxing lessons.

  1923

  Breaks off engagement with Svetlana Siewert. Publication of The Empyrean Path. Publication of VN’s translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

  1925

  Marries Véra Slonim in Berlin.

  1926

  Publication of Mary.

  1928

  Publication of King, Queen, Knave.

  1929

  Publication of The Return of Chorb.

  1930

  Publication of The Defense.

  1932

  Publication of Glory.

  1933

  Publication of Camera Obscura.

  1934

  Birth of Nabokov’s son, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov.

  1936

  Publication of Despair.

  1937–40

  Lives in Paris.

  1938

  Publication of Laughter in the Dark. Publication of The Eye. Publication of Invitation to a Beheading.

  1939

  Death of mother, Elena, in Prague.

  1940

  Nabokov emigrates to USA. Lives in New York.

  1941–48

  Lecturer of Russian and Russian Literature at Wellesley College. Discovers a new species of butterfly at the Grand Canyon, names it Neonympha dorothea.

  1941

  Visiting Lecturer in Slavic Languages at Stanford University. Publication of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

  1942–48

  Fellow of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

  1943

  Receives Guggenheim Fellowship.

  1944

  Publication of Nikolai Gogol.

  1945

  Naturalized as a United States citizen. Death of brother, Sergey, in a Nazi concentration camp. Publication of VN’s translation, Three Russian Poets: Selections from Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev.

  1947

  Publication of Bend Sinister. Publication of Nine Stories.

  1948–59

  Professor of Russian and European Literature at Cornell University.

  1950

  Discovers rare butterfly species, Lycaeides samuelis.

  1951

  Discovers female butterfly, Lycaeides sublivens. Receives Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Publication of Conclusive Evidence.

  1952

  Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. Receives Guggenheim Fellowship. Publication of The Gift. Publication of Poems: 1929–1951.

  1955

  Publication of Lolita.

  1956

  Publication of Spring in Fialta.

  1957

  Publication of Pnin.

  1958

  Receives National Book Award nomination for Pnin. Publication of VN’s translation of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. American publication of Lolita. Publication of Nabokov’s Dozen.

  1959

  Receives National Book Award nomination for Lolita. Retires from Cornell University. Travels in Europe. Publication of Poems.

  1960

  Publication of VN’s translation of The Song of Igor’s Campaign. Writes the screenplay for Lolita in Los Angeles.

  1961–77

  Lives in the Palace Hotel, Montreux, Switzerland.

  1962

  Publication of Pale Fire. Release of the film Lolita, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

  1963

  Receives Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for Lolita. Receives National Book Award nomination for Pale Fire. Publication of Notes on Prosody. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  1964

  Death of brother, Kirill. Publication of the four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Receives Medal for Literature from Brandeis University. American publication of The Defense. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature1.

  1965

  Receives National Book Award nomination for The Defense. Is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  1966

  Publication of The Waltz Invention. Publication of Nabokov’s Quartet.

  1967

  Publication of Speak, Memory.

  1968

  Publication of Nabokov’s Congeries. American publication of King, Queen, Knave.

  1969

  Publication of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Featured on cover of Time magazine, May 23. Receives Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Release of the film Laughter in the Dark, directed by Tony Richardson.

  1970

  American Publication of Mary.

  1971

  Publication of Poems and Problems.

  1972

  Publication of Transparent Things. Release of the film King, Queen, Knave, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski.

  1973

  Publication of A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. Receives National Book Award nomination for Transparent Things. Receives the National Medal for Literature. Publication of Strong Opinions.

  1974

  Publication of Lolita: A Screenplay. Publication of Look at the Harlequins!

  1975

  Publication of Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. Receives National Book Award nomination for Look at the Harlequins!

  1976

  Publication of Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. Receives National Book Award nomination for Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. Receives National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Details of a Sunset and Other Stories.

  1977

  Vladimir Nabokov dies in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 2.

  1978

  Release of the film Despair, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Death of sister, Olga.

  1979

  Publication of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940–1971. Publication of Poems.

  1980

  Publication of Lectures on Literature. Publication of Lectures on Ulysses. National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for Lectures on Literature.

  1981

  Publication of Lectures on Russian Literature.

  1983

  Publication of Lectures on Don Quixote.

  1984

  Publication of The Man from the USSR and Other Plays.

  1985

  Publicatio
n of Letters to His Sister.

  1986

  Publication of The Enchanter.

  1987

  Publication of Carrousel.

  1989

  Publication of Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters: 1940–1977.

  1990

  Publication of The Circle. Publication of Plays.

  1991

  Death of wife, Véra.

  1995

  Publication of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov.

  1997

  Release of the film Lolita, directed by Adrian Lyne.

  2000

  Publication of Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Release of the film The Luzhin Defence, directed by Marleen Gorris. Death of sister, Elena.

  2001

  Publication of Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971.

  2008

  Publication of Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov.

  2009

  Publication of The Original of Laura.

  2012

  Death of son, Dmitri. Publication of Selected Poems. Publication of The Tragedy of Mister Morn.

  2014

  Publication of Letters to Véra.

  Notes

  1. According to the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, information about nominations of Nobel Laureates is not to be publicly disclosed for a period of fifty years. Therefore, Nabokov may have been nominated after 1964. In 1965, Nabokov was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

  The Author of Lolita—an Unhurried View

  Martha MacGregor / 1958

  From the New York Post Weekend Magazine, August 17, 1958. © Martha MacGregor.

  “Lolita is here!” says a triumphant sign taped to the reception desk at G. P. Putnam’s Sons. This is the firm whose eager-beaver young head, Walter Minton, also rescued Norman Mailer’s controversial The Deer Park after its rejection by other publishers in a blaze of sex-sparked publicity.

  Banned in Paris, eyed disapprovingly by the British Home Secretary, self-righteously spurned by at least four American publishers, Lolita has seduced of all things (or people), the once puritanical U.S. Customs.

  Here it is, intact, not a word missing, at three dollars a copy. “I’m very proud that America has not brought charges,” says the distinguished Russian-born author, Vladimir Nabokov. “It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful.”

  Lolita has been dancing in and out of the news for months. An account of a child’s affair with a middle-aged man, the novel was received coldly by Virginia Kirkus, whose reviewing service is popular with lending libraries in this country.

  The Hesitant Librarians

  “Any librarian will surely question this for anything but the closed shelves,” said Miss Kirkus.

  Ralph Ginsburg, author of An Unhurried View of Erotica, comments: “In certain areas of sex practice this is more forthright than any novel I can recall, but it would be absurd to condemn it as pornographic or obscene.”

  The author himself says of the charge of pornography: “Foolish.” And of conflicting theories on the meaning of Lolita: “Just a story, a fairy tale, as all stories are.” Nabokov said this with a smile, as if the whole fuss was a great joke.

  He is a man of tremendous personal charm and this sense of the comical is perhaps his most attractive characteristic. His conversation is punctuated with smiles, or little quiverings of the lips, as if he were about to explode with laughter at the absurdity of life in general.

  Nabokov was born in 1899. His boyhood in Russia has been memorably described in an autobiographical memoir, Conclusive Evidence, published in 1951 by Harper.

  The whole setting of that boyhood lives again in a few pictures: An uncle’s home in the country, a house filled with crucifixes and carnations, his mother in St. Petersburg taking her jewelry from the wall safe—tiaras, chokers, rings—or, fur-coated, riding in a horse-drawn sleigh, a bearskin over her knees.

  Or it is a summer afternoon and a French governess reads Les Misérables aloud on the veranda, a gardener putters among the peonies and a butterfly shines in the sun. (Nabokov’s passion for butterflies dates from his childhood; his parents were also collectors.)

  His early education explains to at least some extent his distinguished English prose style. “I had first an English nurse and then a sequence of English governesses,” he says. “After that, I had Russian tutors.

  “I read English before I read Russian. I spoke English with my mother and my nurse—with my brother, I remember, I always spoke French. That was typical. The children would speak one language together and another language at table and another with their father and mother. Sometimes as many as four languages would be spoken.

  “After I started going to school at eleven, my tutor stayed on and would tutor me at night for the next day. You learned a great deal that way.

  “And we had wonderful courses in French literature. The French governess would read to us three hours a day—the English governess, too. We had all the English magazines and some of the American ones—Little Folks and St. Nicholas.

  “I started reading Turgenev and Tolstoy when I was very small. My wife read Anna Karenina at six. Her nurse said, ‘Come, come, I’ll tell that to you in my own words.’

  “Even then she knew to beware of condensations,” Nabokov added, laughing.

  “I started writing Russian verse very early—when I was thirteen—and published a little book of verse when I was fifteen.”

  Lolita was written in English, but Nabokov insists that he could have done better in Russian. “It’s simply that my knowledge of Russian is infinitely greater than my knowledge of English.”

  At twenty, Nabokov left Russia with his family. His father, a liberal statesman under the Czar, was killed by Russian monarchists with a bullet intended for another man at a Berlin meeting of Russian exiles in 1922. Nabokov took a B.A. at Cambridge and began writing for émigré publications.

  “We were desperately poor, you know. I made my living teaching all sorts of things—tennis, boxing, languages. Writing was something that was so natural to me I would sometimes write a poem every day in the week. It was in those Russian newspapers and magazines that came out in Germany, Paris, and later in New York that I published my stories, poems, and then my novels.

  “Though they were smuggled into Russia, they were absolutely taboo—banned. Once or twice I was invited to come back to Russia—once was when Prokofiev was asked back. But I knew what to expect, so I just stayed where I was.” (Prokofiev returned voluntarily to Russia in 1936.)

  Nabokov is volubly anti-Soviet. In his autobiography he says: “My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any questions of property. My contempt for the émigré who ‘hates the Reds’ because they ‘stole’ his money and land is complete. The most I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.” An uncle left him the equivalent of two million dollars, lost in the revolution.

  In 1940, Nabokov was invited to America to teach at Stanford. Of Cornell, where he now teaches, he says: “Oh, I love it. I’m very happy there. I have the most charming colleagues, very nice students, very large classes in European literature—anywhere from 150 to 300.

  “Actually, I never understood how I became a professor. But I am a full professor,” said Nabokov, looking pleased about it.

  A spokesman for Cornell reports that Nabokov is one of the most popular teachers there. “All sorts of students attend his lectures—engineers, premeds, not just the arts students. It’s partly his knowledge that draws them, partly his humor and, of course, his personality.”

  His wife, Véra, also an émigré of the aristocratic class, whom he met in Berlin and married in 1925, helps with the classroom routine and types his manuscripts. It is obvious that a very tender relationship exists between the two.

/>   They have one son, Dmitri, a Harvard graduate and, his father says, “a wonderful singer.” He’s now doing leading bass roles with the Broadway Opera Association.

  A considerable part of Nabokov’s output as a writer remains in the original Russian in which he wrote during the émigré years. The press estimate of those novels and stories in English has been kind, even ecstatic. He has been compared with Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Gogol, and Chekhov. Pnin, the book before Lolita, drew raves and some interesting comment on his work in general.

  The New Statesman and Nation spoke of his “sweetness” (also, one would guess, a personality trait) and coupled him with a writer little known in this country, William Gerhardi: “Both these young men were young in Russia before the Revolution and it seems as though that experience has endowed them with a sadness at the same time nostalgic and facetious.”