The joyous stylist

Although quite prolific as a poet and a short story writer, Vladimir Nabokov’s reputation rests almost solely on the novel, a form whose potentialities he kept on exploring all along with much enthusiasm. Irreverent and provocative, this man who detested Freud mischievously parodied traditional literary forms to produce works complex in structure yet thoroughly entertaining, comments Vikramdeep Johal.

IN Andre Gide’s The Counterfeiters, (1926), the protagonist Edouard, a writer, thinks that "a good novelist can never be made out of a good naturalist." These words contain more than a grain of truth, as one considers the problems inherent in the task of fusing literature and life, words and things, imagination and experience. One novelist of the post-war era who accomplished it with aplomb was the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. Through his dazzling prose, he not only showed us our own world in all its richness and diversity, but also created alternative ones that never failed to mesmerise and beguile the reader.

Although quite prolific as a poet and a short story writer, his reputation rests almost solely on the novel, a form whose potentialities he kept on exploring all along with much enthusiasm. If the first half of this century belongs to Joyce, Proust and Mann, the second one has been dominated by Grass, Marquez and Nabokov. Irreverent and provocative, this-man-who-detested-Freud mischievously parodied traditional literary forms to produce works complex in structure yet thoroughly entertaining.

This cosmopolitan artist’s corporeal journey, which took him to many places on both sides of the Atlantic, began on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg. Born into a family of White Russain aristocrats, he learned English and French at a very early age, becoming in his own words, "a perfectly normal trilingual child." Two volumes of his verse in Russian got published while he was still in his teens. Then came the Russain revolution, which forced his family to flee West. He continued his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a B.A. in Slavic and Romance languages in 1922.

The years he spent in Berlin (1922-37) and Paris (1937-40) constituted the first mature phase of his writing career. Disturbed by the rise of dictators like Hitler and Stalin and the fast vanishing dream of democracy, he stressed the significance of creative freedom in two Kafkasque works, Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, both set in totalitarian regimes and narrating the intellectual’s attempts to protect his personal integrity against oppressive forces. Also, he drew on his rich memories of Tsarist Russia in his early writings. However, as World War II reared its ugly head, the sense of dislocation caused in him by a nomadic life intensified.

"At a certain turn of my existence in the late 1930s," he recalled, "I had to decide which country to choose for a permanent backdrop." That country turned out to be United States, as he left Europe with his wife and son to take up an academic post at Stanford University. In America, he became highly respected both as a teacher of languages and literature and for the other passion of his life, lepidoptery (butterfly collecting).

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) was his first novel in English. The story of mediocre writer preparing the biography of his dead brother, apparently a great writer, it probed the art of fiction and dealt with the Pirandellian theme of subjectivity of truth, which was to recur in his later works.

After producing a memoir, Speak, Memory, largely an account of his childhood and adolescence in Russia, he dropped in the year 1955 a bombshell by the name of Lolita. The hell-raising story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European scholar who falls madly in love with a twelve-year-old American girl was a unique combination of erotic wit, lyricism and satiric social commentary. American publishers loved it — but none of them dared to send it to the printers. He then sent the manuscript to France where it appeared first, drawing a mixed bag of responses. On one hand it was called "immoral" and "pornographic", and, on the other hand, "original" and "remarkable." Its American edition came in 1958 and became a bestseller. Four decades on, the work still enjoys worldwide popularity, even in India (though for the wrong reasons).

Lolita is definitely not a pornographic novel. Its sensual, poetic prose precludes any comparison with the X-rated trash flooding the market. Consider, for instance, Humbert’s lovely description of this nymphet as she positions herself for a tennis serve: "My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed feet, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip".

The novel is also valuable for its sharp and spicy observation of American society and culture (Lolita is to America of the late forties and early fifties what The Great Gatsby is to the twenties). With effortless ease, it swings between the beautiful and the beastly, the sublime and the ridiculous. With scientific precision — incidentally, he was research fellow in entomology in Harvard — Nabokov exposed the rottenness underneath the kitschy exterior of a crassly commercialized nation.

Pale Fire, (1962) is one of those books that has to be read in order to be believed. Here Nabokov mocks all those pompous literary scholars — he must have met a lot of them in American universities — who are always eager to flaunt their intellectual biceps and erudite triceps. The novel consists of a 999-line poem in heroic couplets, composed by a recently deceased American poet; in addition, there is an extensive and farfetched commentary by his university-colleague and neighbour, an eccentric scholar who may or may not be the exiled king of a Russia-like country named Zembla.

Political intrigue gets mixed with pedantry, the autobiographical with the biographical, the memorised with the imagined, as the reader follows the bizarre notes of the royal commentator. To give just one example of his genius, upon reading the lines. It was a year of Tempests: Hurricane/Lolita swept from Florida to Maine.

Our scholar writes: Major hurricanes are given feminine names in America. The gender is suggested not so much by the sex of furies and harridans as by a general professional application. Thus any machine is a she to its fond user, any fire (even a "pale" one!) is she to the fireman... Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear."

Many of the insane critic’s claims and explanations are pretty shady and, apart from enjoying them, one often doubts his honesty (this idea of the unreliable narrator was used to good effect by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children). For its superbly controlled unorthodox structure, its wild humour and its linguistic-literary acrobatics, Pale Fire is arguably Nabokov’s tour de force.

The writer has been compared to Joyce for inventiveness of wordplay, to Lawrence Sterne for brilliant use of the first-person narrative and to Proust for wonderful evocation of mood and setting. About his writing style, he said: "While I keep everything on the very brink of parody, there must be, on the other hand, an abyss of seriousness. And I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my truth and the caricature of it." A chess enthusiast, he loved playing games with the readers, presenting them with alternative realities like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which only when put together could give a comprehensive picture.

Nabokov vehemently rejected the idea of fiction as a vehicle for social, political and moral messages. He expected a novel to provide him with nothing more than aesthetic pleasure, "a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiousity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm," as he put it. Neither was he impressed by the literature of ideas nor by psychoanalysis. He hated being labelled as a symbolist, an allegorist or a surrealist and repeatedly expressed his contempt for what he called "Freudian voodooism" and "generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists." For him creative satisfaction was the strongest motivation for writing a novel. Not surprisingly, his aesthetic stance alienated quite a few critics and scholars.

After teaching for a decade at Cornell university — which provided the background for Pnin, a satirical portrait of a bumbling Russain emigre professor — he returned to Europe with his wife in 1959 in order to pursue full-time writing. Until his death in 1977, he lived in a posh hotel in Montreaux, Switzerland, preparing English versions of his Russian novels and writing new ones. The theme of forbidden erotic pleasures resurfaced in Ada (1969), his last major work in which he parodied the fictional family chronicle, a sub-genre made popular by 19th century Russian novelists. The memoir of a nonagenarian narrator, recalling his long love affair with his sister, it is a complex novel with sci-fi leanings, packed with esoteric data and literary allusions.

Eccentric emigres, naughty nymphets, loony lovers — his wonderful characters seem to be blessed with the gift of immortality. For his vast erudition (which he both paraded and parodied), his wild imagination and satiric humour, his extraordinary powers of description and intelligent experimentation with form and content, it would be difficult to forget Nabokov his works will continue to amuse, amaze, shock and perplex readers.