Vladimir Nabokov: “I am an American writer born in Russia...”

April 22, 2020 marks the 121st anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977), a well-known Russian-speaking and English-speaking writer, translator, and literary critic who was in forced emigration. Acquaintance with him by a huge readership at home became possible only in the 80s of the last century.

Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in a wealthy noble family. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, earned a reputation as a brilliant lawyer, was a member of the I State Duma of the Russian Empire, managing the affairs of the Provisional Government. The writer’s mother, Elena Ivanovna, the daughter of a gold miner, devoted herself to raising children. The best teachers of the imperial capital were engaged with them, suffice it to say that Vladimir Benois and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky taught the drawing of Vladimir at home. He wanted to continue his education at the Tenishevsky School, where Osip Mandelstam studied shortly before.

For the future writer, the three-story mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya Street, a family house with a special creative atmosphere, became the symbol of a happy, unclouded childhood. The aristocratic society of the Northern capital flocked here, not tired of admiring the successes of the Nabokov children, who freely switched from Russian to French and English; at the last, Vladimir spoke best of all. Later, in the autobiographical novel “Other Shores”, Nabokov admitted that he learned to write first in English, then in Russian.

In 1916, Nabokov, with his own money, published the first poetry collection “Poems” in St. Petersburg under his own name (68 poems written from August 1915 to May 1916). But the 1917 revolution erased the plans of a gaining author. The Nabokovs were forced to emigrate as a family. Instead of the rapid ascent of a bright creative star, an escape from the country. Nabokov becomes the representative of the “unnoticed generation”; many heroes of his works will become the same.

The literary scholar Marina Krasina, in an abstract of a dissertation on the subject “Hero of the “unnoticed generation””, presented in the Presidential Library’s collections, shows the features of the Nabokov hero, defines the features that connect the literary hero of the “unnoticed generation” with the tradition of Russian literature: “What features does the hero of Russian classics convey to his follower? This is, first of all, discord with society, loneliness, criticism (from Chatsky), social apathy and pessimism, a tendency to introspection (from Onegin), extreme individualism, disappointment and reflection (from Pechorin), withdrawal from reality (from Oblomov)”. 

Indeed, could young Nabokov, crossing the border of the Fatherland forever, not experience “apathy and pessimism”?” And then ... England and Cambridge, where he studies Russian philology; pre-war Germany, in which habitual life changed under the influence of fascist ideology; France, saturated with fear and, finally, the United States, where the family moved in 1940.

In New York, a young writer from the “unnoticed generation” again overtakes despair: no one was waiting for him here, and his inborn pride did not allow him to upholster the thresholds of several Russian-language editorial offices. All that remained was to become an American writer; his English allowed it. “Nabokov wrote about the difficulties of rebirth in his letters as about agony”, - the writer Viktor Yerofeev notes in the preface to the first of four volumes of the collected works published in the homeland in the Soviet Union. He experienced an almost physiological torment, parting with his flexible native language”. 

Vladimir Nabokov, who lived on this occasion, said: “I am an American writer, born in Russia, educated in England, where I studied French literature before moving to Germany for fifteen years. ...My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian, and my ear speaks French”. 

The author, meanwhile, is gaining fame, but sometimes he is upset by the illegibility and hypocrisy of the American reader. His major works, such as Other Shores, are noteworthy. The novel "Lolita", contrary to the negative reviews of critics, turns Nabokov into a world-famous writer. Many readers attributed the novel to one of the most piercing stories of love and loneliness.

The fees received for "Lolita" and the written script allowed the writer to leave his teaching career in 1960 and return from America to the Old World. He chose the Swiss Riviera - the resort town of Montreux, where he lived until the end of his days...

In 1964 he translated into English “Eugene Onegin” in four volumes, equipped with extensive commentaries. Nabokov also translated into English Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time”, “Tale of  Igor's Campaign” and many poems by Russian classics.

The prose works of Vladimir Nabokov are half autobiographical. K. Volkov in the abstract "Biography of the writer in the work of V. V. Nabokov of the 1930s - early 1940s" considers the development of the biographical genre in the works of Nabokov on the example of the works “Gift”, “The True Life of Sebastian Knight”, “Nikolai Gogol”.

The works of Vladimir Nabokov, who is considered an excellent stylist, were recognized both in Russian and in American literature, and aroused great interest of researchers in bilingualism.

“Writers who create their works in two languages, especially sharply feel the uniqueness of each of them”, - says Evgeny Smakhtin in the abstract of the dissertation “Verbalization of emotional experience in the artistic idiol of a bilingual writer” - For example, the list of names of emotions of fear, anxiety and impatience in the Russian text is one and a half times wider than in English. One of the main reasons for the emergence of artistic bilingualism is the spiritual mutual attraction of cultures”.