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Vladimir Nabokov #2
Vladimir Nabokov : The American Years
The story of Nabokov's life continues with his arrival in the United States in 1940. He found that supporting himself and his family was not easy--until the astonishing success of Lolita catapulted him to world fame and financial security.
783 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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772 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 - 28 of 28 reviews
April 10, 2024
This is the biography of which Nabokov would approve. The book's focus is on Nabokov's life events and his work, but not on the Nabokovs' (because Vladimir and Vera Nabokov were inseparable) personalities and their private life.
I am especially grateful to the author for the excellent in-depth analysis of Nabokov's American works (similarly B. Boyd analysed his Russian texts in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years).
These chapters were an eye-opener in a way - I realized how much I missed while actually reading Nabokov's texts. It is not surprising - not many writers can compare to Nabokov in style and imagery. His texts also contain numerous hidden patterns, puzzles, hints and allusions - it takes an attentive reader or the second reading is required. Or both.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in the country which he loved very much. Unfortunately, the revolution and the Civil War made him leave it. He never looked back and started a new life with a new language in the USA. The life was not easy but he inevitably became successful and was even called one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He made a lot of money but the saddest thing is that the Nabokovs were constantly on the move, they never had a real home, it was rented houses in the USA or hotels in Europe. He hated the Soviets who had usurped the Russia of his childhood but was not able really feel at home anywhere else in the world although he was grateful to the USA and liked the country.
There are two Nabokovs as there are two languages. My favourite Russian novels by Nabokov are 'The Gift', 'The Luzhin defence' and 'The Deed'. My favourite American novels are 'Pale Fire' and 'Transparent Things'.
I am especially grateful to the author for the excellent in-depth analysis of Nabokov's American works (similarly B. Boyd analysed his Russian texts in Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years).
These chapters were an eye-opener in a way - I realized how much I missed while actually reading Nabokov's texts. It is not surprising - not many writers can compare to Nabokov in style and imagery. His texts also contain numerous hidden patterns, puzzles, hints and allusions - it takes an attentive reader or the second reading is required. Or both.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in the country which he loved very much. Unfortunately, the revolution and the Civil War made him leave it. He never looked back and started a new life with a new language in the USA. The life was not easy but he inevitably became successful and was even called one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He made a lot of money but the saddest thing is that the Nabokovs were constantly on the move, they never had a real home, it was rented houses in the USA or hotels in Europe. He hated the Soviets who had usurped the Russia of his childhood but was not able really feel at home anywhere else in the world although he was grateful to the USA and liked the country.
There are two Nabokovs as there are two languages. My favourite Russian novels by Nabokov are 'The Gift', 'The Luzhin defence' and 'The Deed'. My favourite American novels are 'Pale Fire' and 'Transparent Things'.
October 23, 2012
“...every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows.”
-Speak, Memory
Above is one of my favorite pictures of Nabokov. “Nabokov smiling in the rain”. This is the Nabokov of his American years, plumped up after a doctor ordered him to stop smoking his regular 4 or more packs a day (he replaced his cigarette habit with a habit of maple candies), a look of Jacques Tati about him, or an attractive Hitchcock. What I love most about this picture, though, is the laughing eyes and the smile under the dripping hood of the rain jacket. “Smiling in the rain” is such an apt summation, too, of his attitude toward life. The man who created Humbert, Kinbote, the destroying worlds of Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, the artist so mislabeled by so many as cruel, misanthropic, distant, elitist, full of hauteur to the point of self-parody, was in reality, behind the public masks he would don (as much out of a love of playfulness as a desire for privacy), a man greatly concerned with morals, the search for happiness, the imposing of order on a seemingly chaotic existence, the appreciation of familial love, the search for the bright particularity that claimed a thing or a person from the oblivion of generality, obscurity, vulgarity. Nabokov’s whole philosophy, and the greater part of his body of literature, can almost be summed up as the quest for the dignity of the individual. The fictional character he created that was closest in biographical details to himself, The Gift’s Godunov-Cherdyntsev, considers naming a book he envisions writing "a practical handbook: How to Be Happy"; and as strange as it may seem at first glance, even in books such as Lolita and Despair, this indeed was Nabokov’s aim throughout his entire life and work.
This is even more remarkable when one considers how beleaguered and hounded by history Vladimir and his family were, from the loss of their wealth and estate in the Russian revolution, to their flight across Russia and Europe, his poverty in Berlin, the assassination of his father, the striving to hone his craft in Russian only to be forced to give up his beloved native tongue and relearn it all again in English when Hitler made Europe uninhabitable, his and Véra and Dmitri’s perilous escape from France (the apartment building they lived in in Paris was destroyed by a bomb two weeks after they left for America, the ship they took to America was sunk by a Nazi U Boat on the very next Atlantic crossing after their own), and decades more of constant work, transience and poverty after they finally arrived on Ellis Island in 1940. If anyone had reason to fall into pessimism, defeatism, and negativity, it was Nabokov. Instead, what he remembers most about his arrival in America is that while going through customs after departing the boat in New York Harbor, the agents found in his luggage a pair of boxing gloves he had brought along to teach a young Dmitri- they put them on, began to dance about and jokingly spar with the author. His welcome into America was just the happy surprise he would come to cherish and seek out in life around him, even when history and circumstance seemed to be mounting up odds against him. After 40 years of uncertainty and flight from the tremors of history, America finally provided the refuge the writer needed to realize himself, and all the circumstances of that life seemed to prod him ever closer to the fulfillment his own peculiar destiny, one he had vaguely envisioned for himself since childhood. Despite everything, the Nabokovs ended up the champions in the duel with fate and time.
No wonder then, with a life so different from others, so struck through with what seems to be the evidence of a beneficent hand of fate intervening when cataclysm appears inevitable, that Nabokov’s art became a reflection of this search for pattern and meaning in apparent chaos, the significant detail that illuminates a destiny and foretells a breach in the walls of the prisons of time and the senses. What readers most overlook in Nabokov’s fiction is that ever present but invisible next dimension, the place beyond the story, or death, or time, where the real action of the narrative is being orchestrated. Most wouldn’t think that the true heroine of Ada is the neglected Lucette, or that the center of Pale Fire is neither Shade nor Kinbote but Shade’s doomed daughter (and perhaps even the redeeming nature of familial love itself), that poor tortured Lo, dead from the outset of the novel, was only second to Pnin in the characters that Nabokov himself claimed to love and admire. In all of Nabokov’s mature fiction, dimensions are layered on top of dimensions, morals are inverted and tested against each other, nothing is stable, mirrors abound, and everything feels built of chimeras, ghosts, false floors and trap doors. His prose feels so artificially wrought at times because the stage set is made of transparent things, the workmen are adjusting the props to make up for negligent fate, the man controlling the spotlight might be insane or a murderer, what we are told only reaches us through the refraction of the fictional consciousness we happen to be momentarily settled in, and every book is a carefully planned Funhouse.
To make one’s way through these artful Funhouses, one must always keep in mind that Nabokov was as passionate a scientist as he was a writer. In many ways, his approach to composing fiction was most influenced by the observations he made in the natural world, in particular his lifelong study of lepidoptera. He saw in the elaborateness of nature’s designs an artistic pleasure that the universe seemed to be taking part in- that in the regularity within all structures (atoms, crystals, leaves, the miniscule patterning on a moth’s wings, etc.) there are patterns that seem to be created for the pleasure of our understanding, the deepening of our knowledge alone. In this view, the universe is far from innocent, it is an active participant in our intelligent awakening- it scatters its evidence about in what appears a random toss of debris, but in the intersection of human consciousness with space and time we are trained to seek out its harmonies and meanings, and these point to an order that exists, even if just outside the limits of our perception. If we had the ability to free consciousness from the prison of the senses, to step past the mortal boundary lines and take things in on a universal scale, we might apprehend the entire fabric of our past and future in one timeless gaze, seeing all the moments of our lives that were and are to be in their shining significance, a jigsaw puzzle finished as a complete, recomposed picture- a closed book. The closed worlds of all his mature novels and stories reflect and test this philosophy, in their content and in the style of Nabokov’s prose. Whether Luzhin plummets to his death toward a hallucinated chess board, or Humbert dashes his head to pieces on the bars of his cell, or Van Veen and Ada die into the text of their book, or Shade passes into the mind of Kinbote who passes into the real author of Pale Fire, or Pnin drives off proudly into an unknown but radiantly promising future that redeems the pain of his past, they all come up against this wall that separates their consciousnesses from the infinity of freedom that just exceeds their grasp. Consciousness is the only place where human beings have total autonomy. The mind and the imagination are the only places where limits are meaningless, where potential is unfettered. Yet each mind is also an impenetrable confinement; no matter our efforts we can never step outside of our mortality, and how a character deals with this confinement, how it blinds them or buoys them up, determines the fate of the individual and the story we have been told. Nabokov the writer strews fate's paths with clues all along- anagrams, palindromes, word games, mirror-words and worlds, inversions, doubles, masks- because in his artifice he is attempting to replicate the processes of the first, the greatest artificer, nature herself. The trust he puts into his little scientist-readers is that they will take the time to unweave the knots he has composed in the lines of prose, to search out the telling repetitions, to piece together the fragmented clues left for our intelligence to pleasurably reassemble. He expects us to approach his worlds as humanity approaches the World itself. What he is composing for us is the pleasure of discovery itself.
If one had to place Nabokov the artist among these worlds he created, one would have to think of Transparent Things, and that disembodied voice in the first sentence of the novel beckoning out toward a “person”, a reader, whose attention the voice is struggling to attract. Transparent Things was inspired by Nabokov’s stay in a cheap hotel and his not being able to shut out the sounds of the other tenants drifting in from the thin walls of the adjacent room. Eventually he became invested in these incorporeal voices, he began to know details of their existences, their habits, he began to ask himself questions about their lives. The novel came to be by taking this idea into “the following dimension”: what if the walls of life and death, time, space, and oblivion were as thin as the walls of this hotel? What if those who had passed on, or those existing in other realms of space and time, could casually overhear and become invested in our lives? What if these otherworldly beings could take things a step farther and begin to intervene in our lives? How would they approach us through the dimensional mists? What clues in our space-time-matter would their intervening hand leave for us to comprehend? And if we trained ourselves to listen, could we hear into the workings of other dimensions?
“Metaphysics will not die until humanity does” says Brian Boyd in The Russian Years. Nabokov’s metaphysics of fate and time provide the blueprints for understanding the Funhouses he left us to explore. Without this understanding, much of what he was attempting to express in his writing will remain obscure. Art can never solve these mortal dilemmas, but it can point in a hopeful direction, and I see Nabokov’s works as signposts, tests, little trials of his characters coming up against the walls of their finity and finality. At the same time, as with all great art, they take the edge off of that mortality, let us glimpse through the fissures what can’t be gleaned unless we push intelligence and consciousness, those two realms where humanity blooms best, to the very edge of their limitations.
”Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.”
-Speak, Memory
Above is one of my favorite pictures of Nabokov. “Nabokov smiling in the rain”. This is the Nabokov of his American years, plumped up after a doctor ordered him to stop smoking his regular 4 or more packs a day (he replaced his cigarette habit with a habit of maple candies), a look of Jacques Tati about him, or an attractive Hitchcock. What I love most about this picture, though, is the laughing eyes and the smile under the dripping hood of the rain jacket. “Smiling in the rain” is such an apt summation, too, of his attitude toward life. The man who created Humbert, Kinbote, the destroying worlds of Bend Sinister, Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, the artist so mislabeled by so many as cruel, misanthropic, distant, elitist, full of hauteur to the point of self-parody, was in reality, behind the public masks he would don (as much out of a love of playfulness as a desire for privacy), a man greatly concerned with morals, the search for happiness, the imposing of order on a seemingly chaotic existence, the appreciation of familial love, the search for the bright particularity that claimed a thing or a person from the oblivion of generality, obscurity, vulgarity. Nabokov’s whole philosophy, and the greater part of his body of literature, can almost be summed up as the quest for the dignity of the individual. The fictional character he created that was closest in biographical details to himself, The Gift’s Godunov-Cherdyntsev, considers naming a book he envisions writing "a practical handbook: How to Be Happy"; and as strange as it may seem at first glance, even in books such as Lolita and Despair, this indeed was Nabokov’s aim throughout his entire life and work.
This is even more remarkable when one considers how beleaguered and hounded by history Vladimir and his family were, from the loss of their wealth and estate in the Russian revolution, to their flight across Russia and Europe, his poverty in Berlin, the assassination of his father, the striving to hone his craft in Russian only to be forced to give up his beloved native tongue and relearn it all again in English when Hitler made Europe uninhabitable, his and Véra and Dmitri’s perilous escape from France (the apartment building they lived in in Paris was destroyed by a bomb two weeks after they left for America, the ship they took to America was sunk by a Nazi U Boat on the very next Atlantic crossing after their own), and decades more of constant work, transience and poverty after they finally arrived on Ellis Island in 1940. If anyone had reason to fall into pessimism, defeatism, and negativity, it was Nabokov. Instead, what he remembers most about his arrival in America is that while going through customs after departing the boat in New York Harbor, the agents found in his luggage a pair of boxing gloves he had brought along to teach a young Dmitri- they put them on, began to dance about and jokingly spar with the author. His welcome into America was just the happy surprise he would come to cherish and seek out in life around him, even when history and circumstance seemed to be mounting up odds against him. After 40 years of uncertainty and flight from the tremors of history, America finally provided the refuge the writer needed to realize himself, and all the circumstances of that life seemed to prod him ever closer to the fulfillment his own peculiar destiny, one he had vaguely envisioned for himself since childhood. Despite everything, the Nabokovs ended up the champions in the duel with fate and time.
No wonder then, with a life so different from others, so struck through with what seems to be the evidence of a beneficent hand of fate intervening when cataclysm appears inevitable, that Nabokov’s art became a reflection of this search for pattern and meaning in apparent chaos, the significant detail that illuminates a destiny and foretells a breach in the walls of the prisons of time and the senses. What readers most overlook in Nabokov’s fiction is that ever present but invisible next dimension, the place beyond the story, or death, or time, where the real action of the narrative is being orchestrated. Most wouldn’t think that the true heroine of Ada is the neglected Lucette, or that the center of Pale Fire is neither Shade nor Kinbote but Shade’s doomed daughter (and perhaps even the redeeming nature of familial love itself), that poor tortured Lo, dead from the outset of the novel, was only second to Pnin in the characters that Nabokov himself claimed to love and admire. In all of Nabokov’s mature fiction, dimensions are layered on top of dimensions, morals are inverted and tested against each other, nothing is stable, mirrors abound, and everything feels built of chimeras, ghosts, false floors and trap doors. His prose feels so artificially wrought at times because the stage set is made of transparent things, the workmen are adjusting the props to make up for negligent fate, the man controlling the spotlight might be insane or a murderer, what we are told only reaches us through the refraction of the fictional consciousness we happen to be momentarily settled in, and every book is a carefully planned Funhouse.
To make one’s way through these artful Funhouses, one must always keep in mind that Nabokov was as passionate a scientist as he was a writer. In many ways, his approach to composing fiction was most influenced by the observations he made in the natural world, in particular his lifelong study of lepidoptera. He saw in the elaborateness of nature’s designs an artistic pleasure that the universe seemed to be taking part in- that in the regularity within all structures (atoms, crystals, leaves, the miniscule patterning on a moth’s wings, etc.) there are patterns that seem to be created for the pleasure of our understanding, the deepening of our knowledge alone. In this view, the universe is far from innocent, it is an active participant in our intelligent awakening- it scatters its evidence about in what appears a random toss of debris, but in the intersection of human consciousness with space and time we are trained to seek out its harmonies and meanings, and these point to an order that exists, even if just outside the limits of our perception. If we had the ability to free consciousness from the prison of the senses, to step past the mortal boundary lines and take things in on a universal scale, we might apprehend the entire fabric of our past and future in one timeless gaze, seeing all the moments of our lives that were and are to be in their shining significance, a jigsaw puzzle finished as a complete, recomposed picture- a closed book. The closed worlds of all his mature novels and stories reflect and test this philosophy, in their content and in the style of Nabokov’s prose. Whether Luzhin plummets to his death toward a hallucinated chess board, or Humbert dashes his head to pieces on the bars of his cell, or Van Veen and Ada die into the text of their book, or Shade passes into the mind of Kinbote who passes into the real author of Pale Fire, or Pnin drives off proudly into an unknown but radiantly promising future that redeems the pain of his past, they all come up against this wall that separates their consciousnesses from the infinity of freedom that just exceeds their grasp. Consciousness is the only place where human beings have total autonomy. The mind and the imagination are the only places where limits are meaningless, where potential is unfettered. Yet each mind is also an impenetrable confinement; no matter our efforts we can never step outside of our mortality, and how a character deals with this confinement, how it blinds them or buoys them up, determines the fate of the individual and the story we have been told. Nabokov the writer strews fate's paths with clues all along- anagrams, palindromes, word games, mirror-words and worlds, inversions, doubles, masks- because in his artifice he is attempting to replicate the processes of the first, the greatest artificer, nature herself. The trust he puts into his little scientist-readers is that they will take the time to unweave the knots he has composed in the lines of prose, to search out the telling repetitions, to piece together the fragmented clues left for our intelligence to pleasurably reassemble. He expects us to approach his worlds as humanity approaches the World itself. What he is composing for us is the pleasure of discovery itself.
If one had to place Nabokov the artist among these worlds he created, one would have to think of Transparent Things, and that disembodied voice in the first sentence of the novel beckoning out toward a “person”, a reader, whose attention the voice is struggling to attract. Transparent Things was inspired by Nabokov’s stay in a cheap hotel and his not being able to shut out the sounds of the other tenants drifting in from the thin walls of the adjacent room. Eventually he became invested in these incorporeal voices, he began to know details of their existences, their habits, he began to ask himself questions about their lives. The novel came to be by taking this idea into “the following dimension”: what if the walls of life and death, time, space, and oblivion were as thin as the walls of this hotel? What if those who had passed on, or those existing in other realms of space and time, could casually overhear and become invested in our lives? What if these otherworldly beings could take things a step farther and begin to intervene in our lives? How would they approach us through the dimensional mists? What clues in our space-time-matter would their intervening hand leave for us to comprehend? And if we trained ourselves to listen, could we hear into the workings of other dimensions?
“Metaphysics will not die until humanity does” says Brian Boyd in The Russian Years. Nabokov’s metaphysics of fate and time provide the blueprints for understanding the Funhouses he left us to explore. Without this understanding, much of what he was attempting to express in his writing will remain obscure. Art can never solve these mortal dilemmas, but it can point in a hopeful direction, and I see Nabokov’s works as signposts, tests, little trials of his characters coming up against the walls of their finity and finality. At the same time, as with all great art, they take the edge off of that mortality, let us glimpse through the fissures what can’t be gleaned unless we push intelligence and consciousness, those two realms where humanity blooms best, to the very edge of their limitations.
”Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.”
June 15, 2012
Boyd’s two part biography of Nabokov is absolutely enthralling. Boyd seamlessly weaves biographical details about his subject with literary criticism about the works of his subject. Ultimately, I cannot imagine a more complete picture of Vladimir Nabokov; further, in this picture Nabokov is truly (and accurately) painted as one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century.
*
Boyd identifies one of VN’s most pressing concerns as the absurd inability of human consciousness to return to the ever fleeting moments of the past. However, rather than bore readers with a list of dates and facts, Boyd manages to bring Nabokov’s past to life. Readers are able to follow VN on his many whimsical lepidopterological pursuits and chuckle as the scientist/author perilously braves both bear and rattlesnake (at times blissfully in his own world) in his hunt for butterflies. “Once he was so intent on the chase that he stepped on a slumbering bear” (33). Throughout, Boyd not only interestingly depicts the dogged pursuit of VN, but also explains how this fascination and dedication to the exactitudes of science help shape his world view and, by proxy, his novels.
Some of the most entertaining passages were those in which Boyd revisits VN’s time as a college professor. It is hard not to imagine Pnin himself when Boyd recounts the time that VN, in a rush to be on time to his class, entered a classroom a door too soon. He confidently walked to the front of the room and began his carefully prepared lecture in front of 30 stunned students. When graciously informed that he was in the wrong class, VN announced “‘You have just seen the “Coming Attraction” for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may register next fall’” (299). He gathered his notes, entered the correct classroom and told his students that “‘A most extraordinary thing has just happened, most extraordinary.’” Add to this vignettes about students leaving and/or protesting his class because of his blatant contempt for many of the “great” authors, the unremitting exactitude he required on his exams, and the humorous way he taught Russian and it would be hard not to enjoy reading about these parts of his life.
One thing I found appallingly fascinating is the penury VN lived in most of his life (described thoroughly in both parts of Boyd’s biography). Even after becoming a preeminent émigré writer, he was constantly requesting financial assistance. It shocks me that not until Lolita (and what a story there is behind the publication of that!) did he actually gain fame and financial independence. Perhaps more striking, though, is the supreme confidence that both he and his truly exceptional wife, Vera, had that other would indeed one day recognize his brilliance.
*
Boyd does a wonderful job splicing together VN’s life and the many inspirations that prompted him to write his stories with thorough criticism of the works themselves. In this half more so than the first part of the biography, full chapters are dedicated to dissecting each of VN’s novels. Boyd proves himself a very astute critic as well as a biographer, and anyone who reads Pale Fire absolutely must read the chapter Boyd dedicates to dissecting it.
Never would I have believed that 1,300 pages of biography could be so illuminating, engaging, and just so damn interesting. As much credit as VN deserves for living such an amazing life, Boyd deserves at least as much for so thoroughly chronicling it in a way that truly bring Vladimir Nabokov to life once again—allowing the great author to be indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of all readers.
*
Boyd identifies one of VN’s most pressing concerns as the absurd inability of human consciousness to return to the ever fleeting moments of the past. However, rather than bore readers with a list of dates and facts, Boyd manages to bring Nabokov’s past to life. Readers are able to follow VN on his many whimsical lepidopterological pursuits and chuckle as the scientist/author perilously braves both bear and rattlesnake (at times blissfully in his own world) in his hunt for butterflies. “Once he was so intent on the chase that he stepped on a slumbering bear” (33). Throughout, Boyd not only interestingly depicts the dogged pursuit of VN, but also explains how this fascination and dedication to the exactitudes of science help shape his world view and, by proxy, his novels.
Some of the most entertaining passages were those in which Boyd revisits VN’s time as a college professor. It is hard not to imagine Pnin himself when Boyd recounts the time that VN, in a rush to be on time to his class, entered a classroom a door too soon. He confidently walked to the front of the room and began his carefully prepared lecture in front of 30 stunned students. When graciously informed that he was in the wrong class, VN announced “‘You have just seen the “Coming Attraction” for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may register next fall’” (299). He gathered his notes, entered the correct classroom and told his students that “‘A most extraordinary thing has just happened, most extraordinary.’” Add to this vignettes about students leaving and/or protesting his class because of his blatant contempt for many of the “great” authors, the unremitting exactitude he required on his exams, and the humorous way he taught Russian and it would be hard not to enjoy reading about these parts of his life.
One thing I found appallingly fascinating is the penury VN lived in most of his life (described thoroughly in both parts of Boyd’s biography). Even after becoming a preeminent émigré writer, he was constantly requesting financial assistance. It shocks me that not until Lolita (and what a story there is behind the publication of that!) did he actually gain fame and financial independence. Perhaps more striking, though, is the supreme confidence that both he and his truly exceptional wife, Vera, had that other would indeed one day recognize his brilliance.
*
Boyd does a wonderful job splicing together VN’s life and the many inspirations that prompted him to write his stories with thorough criticism of the works themselves. In this half more so than the first part of the biography, full chapters are dedicated to dissecting each of VN’s novels. Boyd proves himself a very astute critic as well as a biographer, and anyone who reads Pale Fire absolutely must read the chapter Boyd dedicates to dissecting it.
Never would I have believed that 1,300 pages of biography could be so illuminating, engaging, and just so damn interesting. As much credit as VN deserves for living such an amazing life, Boyd deserves at least as much for so thoroughly chronicling it in a way that truly bring Vladimir Nabokov to life once again—allowing the great author to be indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of all readers.
May 9, 2018
Late in life Nabokov wrote to his first biographer Andrew Field, in a failed attempt to set him on the right path:
“I should have warned you, perhaps, before you started upon your project, that despite a semblance of joviality and ready wit, I am really a rather dreary and lonely person in terms of visible life. . . . The number of friends I have had or have is quite abnormally small and amongst them the two or three intimate ones I ever had are now dead. The jolts of my era kept creating gaps in space and gulfs in time between me and the few people dear to me. . . .”
(That sad, understated phrase “jolts of my era,” sums up a revolution that exiled him from Russia and a personal fortune at 18, the assassination of his father, two separate flights from Nazis with his Jewish wife, and the deaths of his brother and close friends in German concentration camps.)
Nabokov then continues outlining what he views as the ideal biography:
“To sum up: the only rational and artistic way to write the history of an individual of my dismal kind (whose only human and entertaining side is the gift of inventing clouds, castles, lakes) would be to follow his development as a writer from his first opaque poems to Transparent Things.”
Nabokov thus provides his biographer with a blueprint, but also hands over the keys. “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” is an early story dealing with one of his key themes, “a tribute to a world predisposed for happiness and a lament for a world nevertheless condemned by history to so much unhappiness” (Boyd’s phrase.) But the story also contains some his first metafictional trapdoors and suggestions of an authorship beyond this world, which would build throughout his work until Transparent Things. His growing emphasis on metaphysics in his works was given an official imprimatur in 1979 when Véra Nabokov stated that potustoronnost, “otherworldliness,” was the “watermark” of her husband’s late fiction.
While Field seems to have ignored or lost this VN’s letter, Brian Boyd happily took this direction and built over two volumes just the sort of “rational and artistic” history of the writer and his work, that Nabokov had in mind.
While volume one dealt with all the “jolts” of history, volume two begins with the Nabokovs' arrival in America in 1940. It takes us thru Nabokov’s struggles to find work despite as he wrote to Edmund Wilson, “Funny—to know Russian better than any living person—in America at least—and more English than any Russian in America—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job;” his years in the university like Pnin and John Shade; his summer Humbertian rambles around the West hunting butterflies with Vera; his years working in libraries annotating like Kinbote Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vol. I; the storm he would call “Hurricane Lolita;” and finally his years of creative repose in Montreux.
While few writers have had more interesting histories, it’s ultimately Nabokov’s work that’s more interesting and lasting, and this is were this book is most valuable giving us context gained from unparalleled access to materials and Nabokov’s family, and then Boyd’s insightful analysis of the individual works. These analyses are given in individual chapters, and if published as a separate volume, “Boyd’s Guide to Nabokov,” would likely be the best single-volume criticism of Nabokov.
There are many approaches to Nabokov’s work, and while Boyd will be invaluable for them all, I chose the more masochistic thru-hiking route. I would read along in the biography stopping to read the referenced work (poem, story, novel, play) en route, then read Boyd’s commentary before proceeding to the next stop. What was unexpectedly rewarding about this method was the time Boyd spends on the short stories and poems both analyzing them and setting them in context with his larger works. Thus you can see VN trying out, in early stories like “The Aurelian” and later ones like “The Vane Sisters,” themes and techniques he would expand on in larger works.
Boyd’s style is natural and free of academic jargon. Despite being a doorstop, the reading is easy and can be read in sections or as a reference work. The biography does drag a bit at this end, as Nabokov himself does. If I had one criticism of the book, however, it would be that because this is a biography of Nabokov the Writer rather than the Man, we never really end up with a real clear idea what he was like beyond his work and public persona. Nabokov, would of course, say that is is completely irrelevant, but we are nonetheless curious. Fortunately, we have Stacy Schiff’s excellent biography of Véra, Vera which after reading I feel like I got a much better sense of how different Nabokov was in real life than I’d imagined him.
“I should have warned you, perhaps, before you started upon your project, that despite a semblance of joviality and ready wit, I am really a rather dreary and lonely person in terms of visible life. . . . The number of friends I have had or have is quite abnormally small and amongst them the two or three intimate ones I ever had are now dead. The jolts of my era kept creating gaps in space and gulfs in time between me and the few people dear to me. . . .”
(That sad, understated phrase “jolts of my era,” sums up a revolution that exiled him from Russia and a personal fortune at 18, the assassination of his father, two separate flights from Nazis with his Jewish wife, and the deaths of his brother and close friends in German concentration camps.)
Nabokov then continues outlining what he views as the ideal biography:
“To sum up: the only rational and artistic way to write the history of an individual of my dismal kind (whose only human and entertaining side is the gift of inventing clouds, castles, lakes) would be to follow his development as a writer from his first opaque poems to Transparent Things.”
Nabokov thus provides his biographer with a blueprint, but also hands over the keys. “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” is an early story dealing with one of his key themes, “a tribute to a world predisposed for happiness and a lament for a world nevertheless condemned by history to so much unhappiness” (Boyd’s phrase.) But the story also contains some his first metafictional trapdoors and suggestions of an authorship beyond this world, which would build throughout his work until Transparent Things. His growing emphasis on metaphysics in his works was given an official imprimatur in 1979 when Véra Nabokov stated that potustoronnost, “otherworldliness,” was the “watermark” of her husband’s late fiction.
While Field seems to have ignored or lost this VN’s letter, Brian Boyd happily took this direction and built over two volumes just the sort of “rational and artistic” history of the writer and his work, that Nabokov had in mind.
While volume one dealt with all the “jolts” of history, volume two begins with the Nabokovs' arrival in America in 1940. It takes us thru Nabokov’s struggles to find work despite as he wrote to Edmund Wilson, “Funny—to know Russian better than any living person—in America at least—and more English than any Russian in America—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job;” his years in the university like Pnin and John Shade; his summer Humbertian rambles around the West hunting butterflies with Vera; his years working in libraries annotating like Kinbote Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vol. I; the storm he would call “Hurricane Lolita;” and finally his years of creative repose in Montreux.
While few writers have had more interesting histories, it’s ultimately Nabokov’s work that’s more interesting and lasting, and this is were this book is most valuable giving us context gained from unparalleled access to materials and Nabokov’s family, and then Boyd’s insightful analysis of the individual works. These analyses are given in individual chapters, and if published as a separate volume, “Boyd’s Guide to Nabokov,” would likely be the best single-volume criticism of Nabokov.
There are many approaches to Nabokov’s work, and while Boyd will be invaluable for them all, I chose the more masochistic thru-hiking route. I would read along in the biography stopping to read the referenced work (poem, story, novel, play) en route, then read Boyd’s commentary before proceeding to the next stop. What was unexpectedly rewarding about this method was the time Boyd spends on the short stories and poems both analyzing them and setting them in context with his larger works. Thus you can see VN trying out, in early stories like “The Aurelian” and later ones like “The Vane Sisters,” themes and techniques he would expand on in larger works.
Boyd’s style is natural and free of academic jargon. Despite being a doorstop, the reading is easy and can be read in sections or as a reference work. The biography does drag a bit at this end, as Nabokov himself does. If I had one criticism of the book, however, it would be that because this is a biography of Nabokov the Writer rather than the Man, we never really end up with a real clear idea what he was like beyond his work and public persona. Nabokov, would of course, say that is is completely irrelevant, but we are nonetheless curious. Fortunately, we have Stacy Schiff’s excellent biography of Véra, Vera which after reading I feel like I got a much better sense of how different Nabokov was in real life than I’d imagined him.
August 3, 2009
I find that biography provides the path I need to enter into the world of a great writer, to comprehend as well as I can the experience, personality and mind of someone whose fiction I want to read and understand. For example, I read six or seven biographies of Marcel Proust before I could finish his great novel, actually before I could proceed beyond the first 200 pages of volume one. And then I read all 3300 pages nearly without interruption and with great pleasure and insight.
For decades I've harbored a sense that VN's fiction amounted to so many overwrought, precious and self-congratulatory confections. I suspect I'll have the same response when I read Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire, but I also suspect that I'll approach these books with a much enhanced understanding of their artistry and beauty and the gifts and experience that enabled VN to write them. And I might even be able to finish them now. We'll see.
I appreciate the literary criticism that Boyd intersperces among the chapters of his biography.
I will note that VN must have been a thoroughly obnoxious character, with an entirely imperturbable grandiosity, bordering on paranoia, I suspect. I haved learned to value his writing, nonetheless. Of course, he has been dead for 32 years, and none of his venemous spewings and malicious rantings had anything whatever to do with me. So reading this volume of his biography has helped me practice this sort of detachment, which I sorely need, yet once more.
For decades I've harbored a sense that VN's fiction amounted to so many overwrought, precious and self-congratulatory confections. I suspect I'll have the same response when I read Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire, but I also suspect that I'll approach these books with a much enhanced understanding of their artistry and beauty and the gifts and experience that enabled VN to write them. And I might even be able to finish them now. We'll see.
I appreciate the literary criticism that Boyd intersperces among the chapters of his biography.
I will note that VN must have been a thoroughly obnoxious character, with an entirely imperturbable grandiosity, bordering on paranoia, I suspect. I haved learned to value his writing, nonetheless. Of course, he has been dead for 32 years, and none of his venemous spewings and malicious rantings had anything whatever to do with me. So reading this volume of his biography has helped me practice this sort of detachment, which I sorely need, yet once more.
March 30, 2018
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years continues where The Russian Years leaves off, with Russian-American literary giant Nabokov moving to the U.S., settling down as best he could and trying to make a name for himself. The famous author of Lolita spent the second half developing his writing and his reputation like no other writer of the 20th century, and author Brian Boyd adeptly tells his story in a way that honors and pays homage to him. This volume, coupled with the biography of Nabokov's years in Russia and in Europe, is a fantastic and enlightening look into one of my favorite authors, and I was enthralled the entire way through.
Boyd presents fascinating anecdotes and recollections from Nabokov's students, friends and family that provided such an additional insight into his life, beyond his reputation as an aloof, haughty old man—although his reputation for being snobby shatters a bit when you realize the reason he refused to do grant live interviews was really because he felt so mortified and ashamed of his performances. That Nabokov is a man most literary enthusiasts are not familiar with, and even I, though I've read many of Nabokov's own books and analysis of them, was warmed by Boyd's depiction of Nabokov as a friendly and charming man despite his fame in later life. The personal biographical details in this book were delightful, and I wished there were more, although I know the Nabokovs were famously private (thus the reputation Nabokov earned as not being friendly). But the balance between personal and professional stories that Boyd spins here are fantastic to understand the man behind the novels.
Lolita, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory all rank among my all-time favorite books, and the more I read about them in this volume of Nabokov's life, once it was clear he had developed into the best writing shape of his life, the more I appreciated every little thing about them. Boyd's analysis made me yearn to read the books again after too long away from them.
I was pleased with the much more manageable level of literary analysis presented in The American Years compared with this book's predecessor. While Boyd devotes whole chapters to books in this volume as well, he also spends much more time discussing Nabokov's devotion to writing in his post-Lolita years, when he had more time to other projects besides simply writing for the sake of an income. Understanding the struggles that Nabokov went through—not even mentioning the strife he and his family faced for decades after leaving Russia—paints such a more vibrant picture of his life that Boyd weaved into his analysis of Nabokov's books and why certain inclusions were made. More than any other biography I've read on Nabokov, Boyd's made all the puzzle pieces fit.
I was quite speechless at several points while reading The American Years, including after I'd finished writing it, knowing that the fantastic tomes I'd read on Nabokov had come to an end. I commend Boyd for taking on such monumental subject for a pair of biographies, and I encourage every Nabokov fan to read them and gain even more appreciation for Nabokov himself.
Boyd presents fascinating anecdotes and recollections from Nabokov's students, friends and family that provided such an additional insight into his life, beyond his reputation as an aloof, haughty old man—although his reputation for being snobby shatters a bit when you realize the reason he refused to do grant live interviews was really because he felt so mortified and ashamed of his performances. That Nabokov is a man most literary enthusiasts are not familiar with, and even I, though I've read many of Nabokov's own books and analysis of them, was warmed by Boyd's depiction of Nabokov as a friendly and charming man despite his fame in later life. The personal biographical details in this book were delightful, and I wished there were more, although I know the Nabokovs were famously private (thus the reputation Nabokov earned as not being friendly). But the balance between personal and professional stories that Boyd spins here are fantastic to understand the man behind the novels.
Lolita, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory all rank among my all-time favorite books, and the more I read about them in this volume of Nabokov's life, once it was clear he had developed into the best writing shape of his life, the more I appreciated every little thing about them. Boyd's analysis made me yearn to read the books again after too long away from them.
I was pleased with the much more manageable level of literary analysis presented in The American Years compared with this book's predecessor. While Boyd devotes whole chapters to books in this volume as well, he also spends much more time discussing Nabokov's devotion to writing in his post-Lolita years, when he had more time to other projects besides simply writing for the sake of an income. Understanding the struggles that Nabokov went through—not even mentioning the strife he and his family faced for decades after leaving Russia—paints such a more vibrant picture of his life that Boyd weaved into his analysis of Nabokov's books and why certain inclusions were made. More than any other biography I've read on Nabokov, Boyd's made all the puzzle pieces fit.
I was quite speechless at several points while reading The American Years, including after I'd finished writing it, knowing that the fantastic tomes I'd read on Nabokov had come to an end. I commend Boyd for taking on such monumental subject for a pair of biographies, and I encourage every Nabokov fan to read them and gain even more appreciation for Nabokov himself.
April 9, 2018
From a Transcript of a Review Read Aloud to the Lovely Ladies of a Local Literary Salon
A tour de force. Anecdotal astonishments abound. Tasty tidbits include a look at Nabokov's distaste for finding himself the keeper of a page-a-day daily diary. Laugh yourself silly at the amazing marvel of the dwarf in the snow. His macho confrontation of the husband of Shirley Jackson at one of those college professor mixers (spoiler: it boiled down to Vlad puffing up to Stanley and saying, "You said what about my father?") See how Nabokov spent the second half of his life translating the works from the first half of his life (he took what he wrote in his own words, his dream language of Russian, and rewrote it in his own words, the adopted lullaby dream gibberish of English). If you won't remove yourself from the lecture hall, I'll have you removed if I have to do it myself. Now, where were we? Questions of time bubble like champagne in the brain of Nabokov. His expatriate characters always in a quest for self-erasure whether disappearing across borders or stepping in front of trains: a reflection of the man, a hunted look in his eyes, fleeing Berlin with wife and child in tow. Not to mention (but to mention), from the Truth is No Stranger to Fiction File, the crazed fan, the twisted translator of Pale Fire who put a kaput to her literary future by festering up the fair-faced text with new and unusual Kinboticisms. It had the riddle and rhyme of a horror movie medical mystery: the transplant operation of a more diseased appendix into an otherwise healthy patient.
A tour de force. Anecdotal astonishments abound. Tasty tidbits include a look at Nabokov's distaste for finding himself the keeper of a page-a-day daily diary. Laugh yourself silly at the amazing marvel of the dwarf in the snow. His macho confrontation of the husband of Shirley Jackson at one of those college professor mixers (spoiler: it boiled down to Vlad puffing up to Stanley and saying, "You said what about my father?") See how Nabokov spent the second half of his life translating the works from the first half of his life (he took what he wrote in his own words, his dream language of Russian, and rewrote it in his own words, the adopted lullaby dream gibberish of English). If you won't remove yourself from the lecture hall, I'll have you removed if I have to do it myself. Now, where were we? Questions of time bubble like champagne in the brain of Nabokov. His expatriate characters always in a quest for self-erasure whether disappearing across borders or stepping in front of trains: a reflection of the man, a hunted look in his eyes, fleeing Berlin with wife and child in tow. Not to mention (but to mention), from the Truth is No Stranger to Fiction File, the crazed fan, the twisted translator of Pale Fire who put a kaput to her literary future by festering up the fair-faced text with new and unusual Kinboticisms. It had the riddle and rhyme of a horror movie medical mystery: the transplant operation of a more diseased appendix into an otherwise healthy patient.
August 17, 2007
terrific read about a truly inspirational man. Helped instill in me a greater appreciation for precision and detail in art and life.
June 21, 2015
Surprisingly, part 2 is a bit zippier than part 1, considering we're done country hopping. Another astounding work.
February 1, 2023
If any book deserves five stars, it is this one. It tells the continued story of Vladimir Nabokov and his family, as they begin their lives in North America after decades of evading one despotic government after another (Russia, Nazi Germany). In volume one, Boyd takes Nabokov all the way from birth to the year 1940, when he and his family, by a matter of weeks, escape the Nazi invasion of France. For years, Nabokov has had his eye on America as a safe place in which to write literature. And he found it. But not immediately. He has to live in penury first, flitting from one part-time teaching job to another, until finally he lands a full time position at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. It is here that he writes his controversial novel Lolita, which catapults him into worldwide fame. Boyd does an apt job describing all the struggles that Nabokov and Vera underwent, never having a place to call their own, moving from one rental house to another.
I like biographies because I always come out smarter than I was prior to reading them. By the end of this book, I could describe the Bolshevik Revolution to a stranger, if called upon to do so. I could say a few things about butterfly collecting, the complex structures of novels; I could speak briefly on such writers as Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Bunin, Lemertov, Edmund Wilson, Simon Karlinsky, and of course, Vladimir Nabokov himself. I could describe several vacation resorts in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and trace the route that Vladimir and his family took while hunting butterflies in the American west.
The only sections of the book in which I got bogged down were Boyd’s critical reviews of Nabokov’s works. They were astute, but they seemed to go on relentlessly. Just when my head is pulsing with fatigue, I am disconcerted when I see many more pages to go until that glorious white space signaling the end of the chapter. Now, If I had read Nabokov’s books before reading the biography, I might have felt differently, but I came to Boyd’s reviews cold and unprepared. It seemed to me that Boyd could easily have cut these reviews straight from his Ph. D thesis and pasted them in the manuscript of this biography. Despite their being the very antithesis of brevity, I can still sproclaim my 5-star enthusiasm for the biography.
I did read Boyd concurrently with Vera, Stacy Schiff’s biography of Vladimir’s devoted wife and business partner. It was good, even winning the Pulitzer prize, but nowhere near Boyd’s. Schiff added nuances that Boyd doesn’t touch; while Boyd puts the lion’s share of his attention on Vladimir, in his book, Vera appears as a two-dimensional cardboard character. Schiff brings her to life, makes her a living, breathing woman. Reading the two books together added that third dimension that made my experience as a reader synergistic.
Boyd is clearly a big fan of Nabokov; his prose is dripping with praise, but—to his credit--he isn’t afraid of downvoting some of his novels and stories, explaining why they don’t work well. Moreover, Boyd’s feelings toward Andrew Field, Nabokov’s first biographer, are plainly evident. There is clear disdain. Boyd showcases Field’s flaws, his refusal to cooperate, and spends several pages on his eventual estrangement from the Nabokovs.
I can’t praise this biography enough. It will not be donated to the thrift store but will be placed at eye-level on my bookshelf as a sort of trophy for the six weeks it took me to read it. If you call yourself a fan of Nabokov, you’ve probably already read it; if not, get it. Now.
I like biographies because I always come out smarter than I was prior to reading them. By the end of this book, I could describe the Bolshevik Revolution to a stranger, if called upon to do so. I could say a few things about butterfly collecting, the complex structures of novels; I could speak briefly on such writers as Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Bunin, Lemertov, Edmund Wilson, Simon Karlinsky, and of course, Vladimir Nabokov himself. I could describe several vacation resorts in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and trace the route that Vladimir and his family took while hunting butterflies in the American west.
The only sections of the book in which I got bogged down were Boyd’s critical reviews of Nabokov’s works. They were astute, but they seemed to go on relentlessly. Just when my head is pulsing with fatigue, I am disconcerted when I see many more pages to go until that glorious white space signaling the end of the chapter. Now, If I had read Nabokov’s books before reading the biography, I might have felt differently, but I came to Boyd’s reviews cold and unprepared. It seemed to me that Boyd could easily have cut these reviews straight from his Ph. D thesis and pasted them in the manuscript of this biography. Despite their being the very antithesis of brevity, I can still sproclaim my 5-star enthusiasm for the biography.
I did read Boyd concurrently with Vera, Stacy Schiff’s biography of Vladimir’s devoted wife and business partner. It was good, even winning the Pulitzer prize, but nowhere near Boyd’s. Schiff added nuances that Boyd doesn’t touch; while Boyd puts the lion’s share of his attention on Vladimir, in his book, Vera appears as a two-dimensional cardboard character. Schiff brings her to life, makes her a living, breathing woman. Reading the two books together added that third dimension that made my experience as a reader synergistic.
Boyd is clearly a big fan of Nabokov; his prose is dripping with praise, but—to his credit--he isn’t afraid of downvoting some of his novels and stories, explaining why they don’t work well. Moreover, Boyd’s feelings toward Andrew Field, Nabokov’s first biographer, are plainly evident. There is clear disdain. Boyd showcases Field’s flaws, his refusal to cooperate, and spends several pages on his eventual estrangement from the Nabokovs.
I can’t praise this biography enough. It will not be donated to the thrift store but will be placed at eye-level on my bookshelf as a sort of trophy for the six weeks it took me to read it. If you call yourself a fan of Nabokov, you’ve probably already read it; if not, get it. Now.
September 15, 2014
As good as the first volume, probably a little better. There's certainly a lot more information available about N during the second half of his life, especially anecdotes and personal stories that bring him to life much more fully. At times the two volumes almost seem to be about two different people. There's so little in the way of stories about his personality and behavior in the first volume that he came off as somewhat aloof and distant, while this one reveals him to be an extremely friendly jokester.
There's a bit of hero-worship on the part of Boyd that at times seems to threaten the objectivity of the text. Though then again, I tend to hero worship N as well. He comes across as the rare fully-realized human being operating at a level high above the rest of us. Really, I'm a bit jealous.
And as with the first volume, the detailed analyses (each novel gets a full chapter this time) of N's work are top-notch and deserve to be read as a forward or afterword to each future rereading of his novels.
P.S. This one took me forever to finish because I started graduate school two weeks ago and the amount of time I have for pleasure reading is now pretty minimal. Sadly this is probably marks the end of my post-collegiate literary gluttony (RIP 2005-2014).
There's a bit of hero-worship on the part of Boyd that at times seems to threaten the objectivity of the text. Though then again, I tend to hero worship N as well. He comes across as the rare fully-realized human being operating at a level high above the rest of us. Really, I'm a bit jealous.
And as with the first volume, the detailed analyses (each novel gets a full chapter this time) of N's work are top-notch and deserve to be read as a forward or afterword to each future rereading of his novels.
P.S. This one took me forever to finish because I started graduate school two weeks ago and the amount of time I have for pleasure reading is now pretty minimal. Sadly this is probably marks the end of my post-collegiate literary gluttony (RIP 2005-2014).
October 28, 2014
Pretty much the same review as Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Great research, good analysis but a little too much Nabokovian worshiping from Boyd to my liking. Still, the effort deserves five stars.
May 7, 2012
It was good. A series of successes is less interesting to me than the struggle, so I enjoyed the first volume, and the first half of this volume more than the second half.
May 1, 2021
Such a great second part of the biography of such an interesting man. The American Years time frame was the more interesting part of his life, and the one that birthed my favorite books. He inspires me to learn, watch, and appreciate.
"In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the readers attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all 'general ideas' (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another." VN -pg 340.
"In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the readers attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all 'general ideas' (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers shortcuts from one area of ignorance to another." VN -pg 340.
November 23, 2017
The definitive biography by the uncontested expert. No scholar should be without the weighty tome in their arsenal.
Want to read
October 21, 2025813.54 Boy
August 1, 2025
[This review is of both volumes of Boyd's biography: [book:Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years|433218]The Russian Years (qv) and The American Years.]
A professor of mine in grad school, for whom I was conducting a directed study of Nabokov, remarked that Boyd had written a hagiography. I didn't think then that Boyd would have taken offense, but I sometimes wonder what Nabokov's take on this two-volume accounting of his life and career(s) would have been, given his opinion (strong) about biography as it is often practiced.
It's true that there's not any great amount of what could be called "dirt" in these hundreds of pages, but I'd like to believe that any reader who respects Nabokov as much as he respected his readers wouldn't be looking for that anyway. (Andrew Field's ludicrous fantasies exist for anyone with an appetite for that kind of literary excrement.)
What is to be gained in reading Boyd's account is a clearer grasp of the circumstances and various locations in which Nabokov lived which influenced his writing. This doesn't mean following a trail of clues to discover who Lolita really was, or how Sputnik impacted the socio-political climate of Pale Fire, but the composition of various works as Nabokov transitioned from Russia and writing in Russian to Germany, England, America and Europe and writing in his second (third?) language. We learn to picture the author of Lolita writing out fragments of a book on notecards, riding in the passanger seat as his beloved wife drove the couple across the United States. We come to understand the significance of Vera Nabokov in creating various drafts of works as they progressed toward completion. Numerous rented abodes, some cats, years of teaching college students. So no dirt, but plenty of love and labor.
Nabokov himself cautioned that only individual works by a writer should be evaluated, not writings as a whole taken as a measure of an author's "greatness." Yet we needn't ignore that in all of Nabokov's individual works, there is a style which sets them apart from all other styles, even as it marks them as products of an individual genius. Boyd's biography doesn't necessarily explain the origins of this genius, but it provides a fascinating context for it.
A professor of mine in grad school, for whom I was conducting a directed study of Nabokov, remarked that Boyd had written a hagiography. I didn't think then that Boyd would have taken offense, but I sometimes wonder what Nabokov's take on this two-volume accounting of his life and career(s) would have been, given his opinion (strong) about biography as it is often practiced.
It's true that there's not any great amount of what could be called "dirt" in these hundreds of pages, but I'd like to believe that any reader who respects Nabokov as much as he respected his readers wouldn't be looking for that anyway. (Andrew Field's ludicrous fantasies exist for anyone with an appetite for that kind of literary excrement.)
What is to be gained in reading Boyd's account is a clearer grasp of the circumstances and various locations in which Nabokov lived which influenced his writing. This doesn't mean following a trail of clues to discover who Lolita really was, or how Sputnik impacted the socio-political climate of Pale Fire, but the composition of various works as Nabokov transitioned from Russia and writing in Russian to Germany, England, America and Europe and writing in his second (third?) language. We learn to picture the author of Lolita writing out fragments of a book on notecards, riding in the passanger seat as his beloved wife drove the couple across the United States. We come to understand the significance of Vera Nabokov in creating various drafts of works as they progressed toward completion. Numerous rented abodes, some cats, years of teaching college students. So no dirt, but plenty of love and labor.
Nabokov himself cautioned that only individual works by a writer should be evaluated, not writings as a whole taken as a measure of an author's "greatness." Yet we needn't ignore that in all of Nabokov's individual works, there is a style which sets them apart from all other styles, even as it marks them as products of an individual genius. Boyd's biography doesn't necessarily explain the origins of this genius, but it provides a fascinating context for it.
August 7, 2011
Boyd's second volume of his sNabokov biography is less aggravating than his first. While Boyd still does not hesitate to celebrate the little contradictory small-minded prejudices of his subject, Boyd commits fewer misreadings of Nabokov's major works. Indeed, he very skillfully demonstrates what several of Nabokov's contemporary critics failed to realize: the uncompromising moral values of some of his more controversial works (Nabokov's admiration for his character Lolita, for example, and his contempt for Humbert; his similar contempt for the "hero" and "heroine" of _Ada_ for their unthinking treatment of Ada's sister, which leads to the younger girl's suicide, etc.). What is still annoying about Boyd is his own lack of knowledge of certain subjects, especially (for this reader, anyway) science fiction. Several times in the text Boyd insists that Nabokov used science fictional conventions in ways that science fiction, with its "gizmos and robots," had never done before. Even reading contemporary science fiction from the eras in question (1940s-1960s; Nabokov certainly had, though he seemed to choose the bottom end of the pulp market over the higher publishing end) Boyd's claims on this subject are rubbish. When this claim first arises, Boyd, talking about a short story of Nabokov's in which the main character looks back at past events from his future vantage point, argues that Nabokov had done something truly innovative with science fiction convention in the story. Needless to say, that very same idea had first been written about some 60 years prior to Nabokov by Edward Bellamy (_Looking Back_), a socialist. It would have been fair to say that no science fiction writer (at least until the 1960s) could produce the quality of prose that Nabokov could. However, Nabokov produced little that was truly innovative, or even original, in the genre of science fiction.
February 8, 2010
all-encompasing, last word on nabokov's life. coming in at over a thousand pages between the two volumes, i never was bored and always looked foward to getting off work so i could learn more about nabnokov's life and art!
June 22, 2013
just as amazing as the russian years, probs one of my favourite BOOKS and not just autobiographies. i really enjoy the way Boyd grounds & integrates literary analysis and criticism within the Nabokov's life.
March 20, 2008
Excellent descriptions/analysis of VN's works. Even if you don't want to read all the biographical details.
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July 12, 2009I read parts of this for my undergraduate thesis.--Finally got around to reading the whole thing cover to cover. Now I'm ready for the highly anticipated publication of _The Original of Laura_.
September 28, 2009
As if Boyd is Nabokov's propagandist. The research is good but the analysis is poor
Want to read
March 7, 2017NYT
March 10, 2014
Great anecdotes, literary criticism part a bit overwhelmed (and overwhelming).
September 23, 2017
Part Two of the definitive biography of Vladimir Nabokov, written by Brian Boyd. Covers the years in America and Switzerland.
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August 18, 2009Vol 2 of a great biog of Nabokov, my favorite writer. A doorstopper of a book!
Want to read
August 10, 2011currently perusing...
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