His Life and Art

Nabokov: His Life in Part By Andrew Field Viking, 285 pp., $15 As of November 1917, Vladimir Nabokov was a citizen of a phantom country —a country without territory, without a government, but with a language, a culture, shared memory. And that fact at once made him a writer and gave him his major themes. Had the history of the first quarter of this century been different, Nabokov would have wound up an extremely rich Siversky landholder, probably following his father, grandfather, and uncles into some form of public service, and working at entomology and poetry on the side.

But then the Revolution came, and it sent Nabokov—who had been told at his St. Petersburg school that he was not “sufficiently Russian”—into the West burning “to become a Russian writer.” What fate took away with one hand, it recompensed with the other. As Field writes: “It has been said that Nabokov’s generation was the most fortunate of all in the emigration. Those born even three years later than Nabokov were too young to have much of Russia to carry away with them. Those who had passed thirty had either a finished past behind them or an interrupted development . . .” Nabokov himself expressed this categorically: “If I had been born four years later, I wouldn’t have written all those books.” For his first books were about Russia—but Russia lost, Russia never to be recaptured except on the page: they were an act of imaginative memory. And memory, in turn, became the theme of his greatest novels: The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire.

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

Featured Tags

Nabokov: His Life in Part By Andrew Field Viking, 285 pp., $15 As of November 1917, Vladimir Nabokov was a citizen of a phantom country —a country without territory, without a government, but with a language, a culture, shared memory. And that fact at once made him a writer and gave him his major themes. Had the history of the first quarter of this century been different, Nabokov would have wound up an extremely rich Siversky landholder, probably following his father, grandfather, and uncles into some form of public service, and working at entomology and poetry on the side.

But then the Revolution came, and it sent Nabokov—who had been told at his St. Petersburg school that he was not “sufficiently Russian”—into the West burning “to become a Russian writer.” What fate took away with one hand, it recompensed with the other. As Field writes: “It has been said that Nabokov’s generation was the most fortunate of all in the emigration. Those born even three years later than Nabokov were too young to have much of Russia to carry away with them. Those who had passed thirty had either a finished past behind them or an interrupted development . . .” Nabokov himself expressed this categorically: “If I had been born four years later, I wouldn’t have written all those books.” For his first books were about Russia—but Russia lost, Russia never to be recaptured except on the page: they were an act of imaginative memory. And memory, in turn, became the theme of his greatest novels: The Gift, Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire.