Vladimir Nabokov: “My Style is All I Have”

April 22, 1899 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) - one of the most famous and extraordinary Russian-American prose writers of the forced emigration, whose acquaintance with a huge readership in Homeland became possible only in the 80s last century. 

Literary scholar M. Krasina in her dissertation abstract on “The Hero of the “Unnoticed Generation” in V. Nabokov's novels” focuses on the commonality of the type of literature studied by her with the type that has developed in literature: “What traits does the hero of Russian classics convey to his follower? This is, first of all, discord with society, loneliness, criticism (Chatsky), social apathy and pessimism, a tendency to self-analysis (Onegin), extreme individualism, disillusionment and reflection (Pechorin), a departure from reality (Oblomov)" .

Could young Nabokov, crossing the border of the fatherland, not experience "apathy and pessimism"?" "Happy son of a happy aristocratic family" whose childhood passed in the very center of St. Petersburg and in sunny Rozhdestveno with the Oredezh River that flowed under a high bank, was forced with his family to be in Crimea and sail to other shores... England and Cambridge, where he studies Russian philology, pre-war Germany, the usual life in which was superseded by fascist madness, France, saturated with fear and, finally, the USA, where the family moved in 1940.   

In the first years of his life in New York, despair again overtakes: no one was waiting for the young writer here, and his innate pride did not allow him to humiliate the editors ’humiliation. There was only one thing left - to become 100% American writer; his English allowed it. “Nabokov wrote about the difficulties of rebirth as an agony in his letters”, - writes Viktor Yerofeyev in the preface to the first of four volumes of collected works published at home in the Soviet Union. - He experienced an almost physiological agony, parting with a flexible mother tongue. But this test Nabokov endured with honor".   

K. Volkov in the author's abstract “Biography of the writer in the works of Vladimir Nabokov in the 1930s - early 1940s” considers the development of the biographical genre in the works of Nabokov on the example of the works “The Gift”, “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight”, “Nikolai Gogol". The little-studied Nabokov essay "Pushkin, or Truth and Credibility" organically adjoins them.

In his dissertation research and the author's abstract to it “The Color-Ethics of the Stories of Vladimir Nabokov: Semantics, Functional Significance, and Role in the Structure of the Text” P. Suslov focuses his attention on one of the most important components of Nabokov's poetics: “Color images are an integral part of the structure of Nabokov's works: if you remove color from them, the texts will lose not only their aesthetic identity, but also lose their semantic depth inherent to them”.

The Americanized author is gaining fame, but sometimes he is saddened by the promiscuity or the bigotry of the American reader. His main writings, such as The Other Shores, attract attention, but not to the same extent as the scandal that erupted after the release of the novel “Lolita”, which, contrary to criticism, turns Nabokov into a world-famous writer. However, there were readers who attributed the novel to one of the most piercing love stories. And besides, the author shows in this work a special type of American philistinism, the world of lovers endlessly turn over the pages of illustrated magazines.

For the fees for "Lolita" and the screenplay written by him in 1961, the writer was able to leave teaching and life in America and return to the Old World. I chose the Swiss Geneva - Montreux... In 1964, he translated into English "Eugene Onegin" in four volumes, with extensive commentary. Nabokov also translated into English "The Hero of Our Time" by Mikhail Lermontov, "The Song of Igor’s Campaign" and many poems of Russian classics.

So it happened that, despite the writer's numerous accusations of egocentrism, the absence of “moral pathos” and even his direct statement that “it derailed Russian literature”, he returned to it, enriched with the experience of a long life.

“The hero of the “unnoticed generation” (the younger generation of Russian foreign writers, who Nabokov also belonged to) is a new and unique figure, but it has similarities with the literary predecessor, the central image of Russian classical literature”, M. Krasin stresses in his dissertation "The hero of the "unnoticed generation" in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov" which is available on the Presidential Library’s portal. - With the hero of this particular literature, his search is brought closer not by money, not glory, not recognition, but a spiritual search. In this image, the traditional for Russian literature issues of conscience, compassion, repentance, crime and punishment are intertwined with existential questions of the relationship of man with the world, with God, with himself”.  

One should hardly believe the assurances of the master like this: “My Style is All I Have”.