Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters free.
Nabokov, “God’s own novelist himself” (William Deresiewicz), “the greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier” (Salman Rushdie), was not only a novelist and short-story writer, but also an autobiographer, poet, dramatist, screenplay-writer, essayist, reviewer, translator, critic, scholar, lecturer, scientist, chess problem and crossword composer, and even a tennis coach and boxing coach.
In pursuing him over forty years as reader and researcher, I have also played many roles: as annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, butterfly namer, cataloguer, conference-goer and conference organizer, critic, documentary adviser, donee, donor, editor, expert witness, interviewee, interviewer, mentor, reviewer, teacher, translator, trustee, and more.
In some of these roles I wrote the twenty-six essays here, most in the last ten years—some even incorporating material discovered only this year—as I worked, most of the time, on very different writers, from Homer and Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss (Nabokov’s friend, Ted Geisel) and Art Spiegelman.
Nabokov drew details of butterfly anatomy while peering down a microscope. The portrait in Stalking Nabokov is less microscopic than kaleidoscopic: Nabokov the man, the thinker, the scientist, and above all the writer: storyteller, poet, intuitive psychologist; diarist, humorist, scenarist and stylist; on his own or in conjunction or contrast with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy and (you didn’t guess this one) Machado de Assis; and as author of Speak, Memory, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and now, The Original of Laura.
I try to tease out Nabokov’s consistency while also highlighting his variety. I sometimes show the hard lone toil of the artist and the scholar (in this case, me too), and how it relies on or resists the work of others. I show how obsessions, Nabokov’s and mine, need not preclude multiplicity and surprise.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters free.
Nabokov, “God’s own novelist himself” (William Deresiewicz), “the greatest writer ever to make a successful journey across the language frontier” (Salman Rushdie), was not only a novelist and short-story writer, but also an autobiographer, poet, dramatist, screenplay-writer, essayist, reviewer, translator, critic, scholar, lecturer, scientist, chess problem and crossword composer, and even a tennis coach and boxing coach.
In pursuing him over forty years as reader and researcher, I have also played many roles: as annotator, archivist, bibliographer, biographer, butterfly namer, cataloguer, conference-goer and conference organizer, critic, documentary adviser, donee, donor, editor, expert witness, interviewee, interviewer, mentor, reviewer, teacher, translator, trustee, and more.
In some of these roles I wrote the twenty-six essays here, most in the last ten years—some even incorporating material discovered only this year—as I worked, most of the time, on very different writers, from Homer and Shakespeare to Dr. Seuss (Nabokov’s friend, Ted Geisel) and Art Spiegelman.
Nabokov drew details of butterfly anatomy while peering down a microscope. The portrait in Stalking Nabokov is less microscopic than kaleidoscopic: Nabokov the man, the thinker, the scientist, and above all the writer: storyteller, poet, intuitive psychologist; diarist, humorist, scenarist and stylist; on his own or in conjunction or contrast with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy and (you didn’t guess this one) Machado de Assis; and as author of Speak, Memory, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and now, The Original of Laura.
I try to tease out Nabokov’s consistency while also highlighting his variety. I sometimes show the hard lone toil of the artist and the scholar (in this case, me too), and how it relies on or resists the work of others. I show how obsessions, Nabokov’s and mine, need not preclude multiplicity and surprise.