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Stalking Nabokov
At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called "brilliant." After gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations.
Boyd confronts Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov's best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov's metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author's secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov's castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author's multifaceted genius.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
14 people are currently reading
326 people want to read
About the author
Brian Boyd
71 books54 followersBrian Boyd (b.1952) is known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
In 1979, after Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle , he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (appointed as lecturer in English in 1980). Also in 1979, Nabokov’s widow, Véra, invited Boyd to catalog her husband's archives, a task which he completed in 1981.
While Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985; rev. 2001), was considered as "an instant classic," Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) have won numerous awards and been translated into seven languages. In 2009 he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, often compared in scope with Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
In 1979, after Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle , he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (appointed as lecturer in English in 1980). Also in 1979, Nabokov’s widow, Véra, invited Boyd to catalog her husband's archives, a task which he completed in 1981.
While Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985; rev. 2001), was considered as "an instant classic," Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) have won numerous awards and been translated into seven languages. In 2009 he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, often compared in scope with Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 1, 2012
Despite a bit of repetitiveness in the first section of this book, this is a pretty damn brilliant panoptical survey of Boyd's work on Nabokov since the completion of the biography. You get glimpses inside the Nabokov archives, thoughts on psychology and metaphysics in the novels (as Vera claimed, metaphysics being the key to them all), his nonpareil humor, an essay comparing Nabokov's meta-worlds with those of Machado de Assis, Boyd's re-evaluation on the authorship of Pale Fire, Boyd on Nabokov on lepidoptery and translation, deeper excursions into Lolita's labyrinths- basically Stalking is a masterful mish-mash of everything a little fanboy of Nabokov could desire on a Christmas morning- all through that positively glowing and gigantic bulb of information that is Brian Boyd's brain. Really, there is no one who knows this much about V.V. Nabokov left on earth now that Dmitri has passed away. If you love Nabokov read this, but also please please read Boyd's biography, which, along with Richard Holmes' Shelley: The Pursuit and Ellmann's James Joyce form the magical triptych of literary biographies.
March 3, 2012
It’s tough to read a book of essays on one author by one author straight through and come away with much more than a general sense of the entire collection and a few specific bits and pieces of various essays that were particularly memorable (either for being good or bad). Let us start with the memorably (good) first page and work our way towards the memorably (bad) last page.
I LOVE the opening—literally the first paragraph of the introduction. Boyd points out that on the day he was born, Nabokov was working on the manuscript of Lolita, possible penning the sentence “There a person in clerical black…inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk” (xiiv). What better way to welcome the reader into Nabokov’s world and his unique metaphysics—with the idea of “fate’s little hints”—than with this little coincidence connecting Nabokov and his most famous biographer?
I recall equally enjoying the first half or so of the book. There were times when I thought that what I was reading wasn’t new information to me; however, I hardly remember much of what I read in VN: The American Years and VN: The Russian Years, and re-reading some of the same biographical details or Boyd analyses meant re-living my initial enjoyment. The only repetitions that did bother me were those that occurred from one essay to the next. This made me realize how much Boyd recycles much of his Nabokov trivia and uses many of the same quotations to achieve different ends. For example, I’d bet that half a dozen essays make use of the end of chapter one of Speak, Memory; there are probably more that re-tell the anecdote of his publishing poems under s pseudonym to dupe a harsh critic; and finally, although perhaps more excusable because it’s a major Nabokov idea, at least half explicitly (in the same words) state Nabokov’s belief that behind nature was a “detail and design, of precise and unpredictable particulars and intricate, often concealed patterns” (87).
Some new information (to me) that I am surprised I enjoyed so much is that found in the “butterfly essays.” In fact, it was enough to impel me to buy Nabokov’s Butterflies.
The essay on “Nabokov, Pushkin, and Shakespeare” was definitely a favorite. And while I liked “Even Homais Nods,” particularly because it catalogues errors in Nabokov’s work, there were parts of the “Humbert-made-up-the-end” rebuttal that left me questioning how we read literature. The whole debate is about whether or not Humbert lies about killing Quilty or whether that really happens, and Boyd proves that it is silly to doubt the “detailed reality of a whole series of major scenes” (307). It got me thinking about how into a book’s world readers/critics should go. I mean, the simple answer is that there is NO reality in the book’s last scenes not because Humbert is an unreliable narrator but because he is a fictitious narrator. The same feeling got to me in Boyd’s analysis of “Pale Fire” as Shade’s poem, seeming to overlook the fact that Shade is just a fictional author created by Nabokov, just as the poem was created by Nabokov. It got me thinking about the difference of accepting a fictional character as narrator versus analyzing a book as if that fictional narrator were the real author. I’ve got more thinking to do.
One essay I did not enjoy was chapter 10’s “The Psychological Work of Fiction at Play.” The analysis here is a real stretch, the kind of stuff that if you decide you’re going to go into a book looking for something specific, you’ll have no problem finding something to fit your theory. Boyd praises the use of the phrase, “‘One feels very much a man of the world’” because “we can recall and imagine sudden moments of self-satisfaction” and “Recognizing shared experience, and wanting to, are at the basis of fiction and the social life fiction feeds on” (112-113). I’m sure that I could mine the damn Twilight series and unearth plenty of “moments of shared experience,” but I’m not about to laud it for its psychological mastery. (Hey, did anyone notice I used the first person plurals “us” and “our” in the opening of this review? That should appeal to your psychological needs to feel accepted and to feel secure as a member of a group! Plus, you can all recall something both memorably good and bad, so I’m sharing an experience with you. God, I’m practically the Freud of reviewers!). The other essays that didn’t thrill me were those in which Boyd really pressed his theories from On the Origin of Stories.
Unfortunately, the last essay was not one I enjoyed partly because it does not agree with my analysis of The Original of Laura and partly because of his claim that “No one has ever packed so much story into the choice of the opening word (‘Her’)” (396). I find his analysis there to be painfully stretched thin, too.
Still, to make a pattern and return to the beginning, my general sense is that this is a very good collection, and Boyd is back to doing what he does best.
I LOVE the opening—literally the first paragraph of the introduction. Boyd points out that on the day he was born, Nabokov was working on the manuscript of Lolita, possible penning the sentence “There a person in clerical black…inquired of me how I had liked Dr. Boyd’s talk” (xiiv). What better way to welcome the reader into Nabokov’s world and his unique metaphysics—with the idea of “fate’s little hints”—than with this little coincidence connecting Nabokov and his most famous biographer?
I recall equally enjoying the first half or so of the book. There were times when I thought that what I was reading wasn’t new information to me; however, I hardly remember much of what I read in VN: The American Years and VN: The Russian Years, and re-reading some of the same biographical details or Boyd analyses meant re-living my initial enjoyment. The only repetitions that did bother me were those that occurred from one essay to the next. This made me realize how much Boyd recycles much of his Nabokov trivia and uses many of the same quotations to achieve different ends. For example, I’d bet that half a dozen essays make use of the end of chapter one of Speak, Memory; there are probably more that re-tell the anecdote of his publishing poems under s pseudonym to dupe a harsh critic; and finally, although perhaps more excusable because it’s a major Nabokov idea, at least half explicitly (in the same words) state Nabokov’s belief that behind nature was a “detail and design, of precise and unpredictable particulars and intricate, often concealed patterns” (87).
Some new information (to me) that I am surprised I enjoyed so much is that found in the “butterfly essays.” In fact, it was enough to impel me to buy Nabokov’s Butterflies.
The essay on “Nabokov, Pushkin, and Shakespeare” was definitely a favorite. And while I liked “Even Homais Nods,” particularly because it catalogues errors in Nabokov’s work, there were parts of the “Humbert-made-up-the-end” rebuttal that left me questioning how we read literature. The whole debate is about whether or not Humbert lies about killing Quilty or whether that really happens, and Boyd proves that it is silly to doubt the “detailed reality of a whole series of major scenes” (307). It got me thinking about how into a book’s world readers/critics should go. I mean, the simple answer is that there is NO reality in the book’s last scenes not because Humbert is an unreliable narrator but because he is a fictitious narrator. The same feeling got to me in Boyd’s analysis of “Pale Fire” as Shade’s poem, seeming to overlook the fact that Shade is just a fictional author created by Nabokov, just as the poem was created by Nabokov. It got me thinking about the difference of accepting a fictional character as narrator versus analyzing a book as if that fictional narrator were the real author. I’ve got more thinking to do.
One essay I did not enjoy was chapter 10’s “The Psychological Work of Fiction at Play.” The analysis here is a real stretch, the kind of stuff that if you decide you’re going to go into a book looking for something specific, you’ll have no problem finding something to fit your theory. Boyd praises the use of the phrase, “‘One feels very much a man of the world’” because “we can recall and imagine sudden moments of self-satisfaction” and “Recognizing shared experience, and wanting to, are at the basis of fiction and the social life fiction feeds on” (112-113). I’m sure that I could mine the damn Twilight series and unearth plenty of “moments of shared experience,” but I’m not about to laud it for its psychological mastery. (Hey, did anyone notice I used the first person plurals “us” and “our” in the opening of this review? That should appeal to your psychological needs to feel accepted and to feel secure as a member of a group! Plus, you can all recall something both memorably good and bad, so I’m sharing an experience with you. God, I’m practically the Freud of reviewers!). The other essays that didn’t thrill me were those in which Boyd really pressed his theories from On the Origin of Stories.
Unfortunately, the last essay was not one I enjoyed partly because it does not agree with my analysis of The Original of Laura and partly because of his claim that “No one has ever packed so much story into the choice of the opening word (‘Her’)” (396). I find his analysis there to be painfully stretched thin, too.
Still, to make a pattern and return to the beginning, my general sense is that this is a very good collection, and Boyd is back to doing what he does best.
August 15, 2016
This was actually offensive. The author is an icky man with a strange sense of humor, and very minimal understanding of Nabokov's novels that he so thoroughly writes about.
He even says he's not sure he "gets" Lolita, but that if he ever does, he'll write a critical book about it. Then he goes on to quote large sections of his critical essay about Lolita that was in his biography about Nabokov—well, one of his biographies of the man. He has written three! So not only does he ramble on and on about the novel he doesn't "get"... But also quotes himself. Who does that? Who writes a book and quotes their other books in it? While admitting they had no clue what they were talking about and still don't?
I only read this book because I knew he attacked what he calls "the revisionists" in it. Six different scholars have studied Lolita and written extensively on the theory that she died in the hospital at age 14, and that Humbert killing CQ never happened. How could it have happened? CQ is his double, his Tyler Durden.
Lolita is a cleverly written parody of the genre, which Nabokov was a big fan of. He loved Gogol who was known for it, and even though he disliked Dostoyevsky's work, he praised his story "The Double." But Brian Boyd tries to find holes in this theory.
Key word being "tries." He gives absolutely no solid reasons for why this can't be. In fact, some of the excuses he gave and quotes he took from Lolita just further drove home the point he was arguing against. He was so oblivious and childish that I got secondhand embarrassment reading this.
He repeatedly brings up Nobokov's screenplay and the fact that Quilty was "real" in it. For a biographer and "stalker" of Nabokov, he sure picks and chooses what he remembers about the man. Nabokov said he didn't really care about the movie much, it was just a way of getting the book a larger audience. He also considered film to be a completely different medium, and said that a book was not like a visual work of art because you had to reread it two or three times to really see it. He said there was a special treat in Lolita for the attentive reader. He said a bunch of other stuff too that debunks the idea of him writing a screenplay to put things in plain sight that he purposely buried in text for readers to figure out, but I'll stop there. Boyd simply doesn't "get" that Nabokov didn't want to ruin the reading experience for moviegoers who hadn't yet read Lolita.
Boyd says, "One aspect of the Enchanted Hunters pattern I noticed many years ago was a series of covert links between the attempted rape of Lolita at the hotel and the killing of Quilty at his manor."
I actually gasped. What does he mean by "attempted" rape? Well, according to him, it would only be rape if the drugs he gave her worked (and he found that scene where he drugged her hilarious, btw). But he says Lolita "suggested they make love" so it wasn't rape.
She was a child, not a teenager or adult. She could not give consent. It doesn't matter if she was 12 or 9, it was rape. It doesn't matter if she experimented with a boy her age or not, because even toddlers do that. It's never not rape when a pedophile has sex with their own child, whether it's a biological, adopted, step, or foster child in their care. Pedophiles always, always say the child consented to it. Psychologists say they even believe that in their minds. But it's called "grooming" when adults manipulate children into sex. Boyd should look it up.
Anyways. He then says, "By the covert parallels he constructs between the climaxes of the novel's two parts, he indicates that both scenes reflect the same romantic sense of the imperious dictates of desire." He says how Humbert killing Quilty despite it being wrong was like that one time he "attempted" to rape a 12-year-old and then "made love" to her knowing it was maybe kinda wrong too.
Once again, he completely misses the mark. The parallel is that Enchanted Hunters is the first scene with Quilty in it, and Pavor Manor the last. Quilty is his double, his shadow self, a representation of his dark side. It was at Enchanted Hunters that Humbert first succumbed to that dark side. Before then, he had successfully suppressed his urge to have sex with a child between 9 and 14 years old. It was during the scene he wrote of Pavor Manor that he "killed" that part of himself forever. He had learned his lesson. Everything he said to "Quilty" in his poem, he was saying to himself.
Boyd wrote an entire chapter on Nabokov's humor, but his best joke went completely over Boyd's head. I'm saving that one for my book. It's gold.
He even says he's not sure he "gets" Lolita, but that if he ever does, he'll write a critical book about it. Then he goes on to quote large sections of his critical essay about Lolita that was in his biography about Nabokov—well, one of his biographies of the man. He has written three! So not only does he ramble on and on about the novel he doesn't "get"... But also quotes himself. Who does that? Who writes a book and quotes their other books in it? While admitting they had no clue what they were talking about and still don't?
I only read this book because I knew he attacked what he calls "the revisionists" in it. Six different scholars have studied Lolita and written extensively on the theory that she died in the hospital at age 14, and that Humbert killing CQ never happened. How could it have happened? CQ is his double, his Tyler Durden.
Lolita is a cleverly written parody of the genre, which Nabokov was a big fan of. He loved Gogol who was known for it, and even though he disliked Dostoyevsky's work, he praised his story "The Double." But Brian Boyd tries to find holes in this theory.
Key word being "tries." He gives absolutely no solid reasons for why this can't be. In fact, some of the excuses he gave and quotes he took from Lolita just further drove home the point he was arguing against. He was so oblivious and childish that I got secondhand embarrassment reading this.
He repeatedly brings up Nobokov's screenplay and the fact that Quilty was "real" in it. For a biographer and "stalker" of Nabokov, he sure picks and chooses what he remembers about the man. Nabokov said he didn't really care about the movie much, it was just a way of getting the book a larger audience. He also considered film to be a completely different medium, and said that a book was not like a visual work of art because you had to reread it two or three times to really see it. He said there was a special treat in Lolita for the attentive reader. He said a bunch of other stuff too that debunks the idea of him writing a screenplay to put things in plain sight that he purposely buried in text for readers to figure out, but I'll stop there. Boyd simply doesn't "get" that Nabokov didn't want to ruin the reading experience for moviegoers who hadn't yet read Lolita.
Boyd says, "One aspect of the Enchanted Hunters pattern I noticed many years ago was a series of covert links between the attempted rape of Lolita at the hotel and the killing of Quilty at his manor."
I actually gasped. What does he mean by "attempted" rape? Well, according to him, it would only be rape if the drugs he gave her worked (and he found that scene where he drugged her hilarious, btw). But he says Lolita "suggested they make love" so it wasn't rape.
She was a child, not a teenager or adult. She could not give consent. It doesn't matter if she was 12 or 9, it was rape. It doesn't matter if she experimented with a boy her age or not, because even toddlers do that. It's never not rape when a pedophile has sex with their own child, whether it's a biological, adopted, step, or foster child in their care. Pedophiles always, always say the child consented to it. Psychologists say they even believe that in their minds. But it's called "grooming" when adults manipulate children into sex. Boyd should look it up.
Anyways. He then says, "By the covert parallels he constructs between the climaxes of the novel's two parts, he indicates that both scenes reflect the same romantic sense of the imperious dictates of desire." He says how Humbert killing Quilty despite it being wrong was like that one time he "attempted" to rape a 12-year-old and then "made love" to her knowing it was maybe kinda wrong too.
Once again, he completely misses the mark. The parallel is that Enchanted Hunters is the first scene with Quilty in it, and Pavor Manor the last. Quilty is his double, his shadow self, a representation of his dark side. It was at Enchanted Hunters that Humbert first succumbed to that dark side. Before then, he had successfully suppressed his urge to have sex with a child between 9 and 14 years old. It was during the scene he wrote of Pavor Manor that he "killed" that part of himself forever. He had learned his lesson. Everything he said to "Quilty" in his poem, he was saying to himself.
Boyd wrote an entire chapter on Nabokov's humor, but his best joke went completely over Boyd's head. I'm saving that one for my book. It's gold.
Read
November 3, 2019All still good stuff. A dipper.
January 16, 2018
[unfinished]
I found Mr. Boyd to be a very intelligent and interesting critic. He has reached into criticism and heaved out something new. That is, he questions whether maybe criticism can go too far away from the author and his/her work, or can sometimes completely ignore that the author's human and sometimes makes mistakes that are not caught (like certain dates in Lolita). The Essays on Lolita and Pale Fire are very good; I cannot, though, speak for the other essays, for I haven't read the works that they are on and thus find it rather silly, if not wasteful, to pursue the with an amount of energy whatever.
I found Mr. Boyd to be a very intelligent and interesting critic. He has reached into criticism and heaved out something new. That is, he questions whether maybe criticism can go too far away from the author and his/her work, or can sometimes completely ignore that the author's human and sometimes makes mistakes that are not caught (like certain dates in Lolita). The Essays on Lolita and Pale Fire are very good; I cannot, though, speak for the other essays, for I haven't read the works that they are on and thus find it rather silly, if not wasteful, to pursue the with an amount of energy whatever.
October 18, 2019
For fans and critics of Nabokov, Boyd's collection of selected essays offer a wide variety of perspectives on the man and his art. From literature to lepidoptera, life to afterlife, Pushkin to Shakespeare, to burn or not to burn... Stalking Nabokov is a treasure trove for anyone wanting more insight into one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists.
Want to read
March 1, 2012why has it taken this long for this book to come into my life?
quick, someone, gift this to me!
quick, someone, gift this to me!
April 24, 2014
Loved Boyd's biography, and thought this would be worthwhile. It did not disappoint, but only for Nabokov-obsessives...
October 16, 2020
Скорее забавная самореклама, потому что большая часть состоит из предисловий автора к другим книгам (и своим, и чужим) и разного рода докладам, вступительное слово и даже тост!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews