Vladimir Nabokov: Overview
Brent MacLaine
The most fruitful way to approach the extensive and varied Vladimir Nabokov canon (verse, plays,
short stories, autobiography, translations, critical articles, and works on chess and lepidoptery) is
undoubtedly through the novels, particularly the earlier Russian ones which are frequently overlooked but
which contain the fundamental themes and devices of the later works. For what is striking about Nabokov's
art is the consistency with which it develops, structurally and thematically, from the initial exploration of
nostalgia and émigré life of Berlin in Mary to the celebration of language and artifice and the treatment of
time in Ada.
Nabokov's second novel, King, Queen, Knave, is the first to juxtapose crime and art for parodic
purposes and leaves its hero, Franz, a myopic character (literally and figuratively), stranded outside the
bliss of his criminal fictions. The Eye, a novella whose émigré narrator is beset with split perceptions of his
self, is, according to Nabokov, the first work where he develops that "involute abode" of his later fiction.
Of the other novels of this Berlin/Paris period, Despair is the most important, since Herman Karlovich is a
recognizable (though very different) predecessor to Lolita's Humbert Humbert. Herman is a wily,
self-conscious villain who devises a complex crime involving the murder of his double, who, however,
does not resemble Herman at all. Herman's "perfect crime," and his journal which records that crime, are
flawed by the same misconception; he fails to realize that contingent reality cannot be manipulated and
that "the invention of art contains far more truth than life's reality."
The Gift is important for its exploration of biography as a fictional form, an exploration which is also
prominent in Nabokov's first English novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. V., the narrator, attempts to
write the biography of his brother, Sebastian Knight, but is foiled at every turn since Knight's life moves
with that same obliqueness as the chess piece after which he is named. Ultimately, however, V.'s narrative
approximates Sebastian's life by virtue of the dynamic character of the unfulfilled quest which uses parody
as "a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion."
Pnin is a warmly witty but sad portrait of Professor Timofey Pnin, an aging Russian exile attempting
to master American language and culture at a New England university; the professorial politicking finally
defeats him. Besides its preoccupation with cultural exile, the novel shows a self-consciousness of
language, though never to the extent that we find in Nabokov's best-known novel, Lolita. In fact, given that
Humbert Humbert, the narrator and hero, writes about his nympholeptic escapades with the
twelve-year-old Lolita in prison where he has "only words to play with," language frames the entire novel
and is the vehicle through which Humbert and Lolita are finally relegated to the "bliss of fiction."
Humbert's sexual desire becomes a metaphor for the artistic desire to create, though not until Humbert
learns the hard lesson that it is desire and not possession which is the transcendent reality. So when
Humbert possesses Lolita in part I of the novel (the crime), he is forced to protect her jealously in a motel
trek across America in part II (the getaway). He has violated the "intangible island of entranced time"
which is established early in the novel with his childhood love, Annabel Lee. It is Annabel Lee in her
"kingdom by the sea" who establishes the initial rift between desire and possession. Ultimately, Lolita is
abducted from Humbert by Quilty, Humbert's double, and the final chase scene culminates in Quilty's
murder, a comic, grotesque exorcism that allows Humbert some measure of grace in the "bliss of fiction."
Pale Fire is the most experimental and enigmatic of Nabokov's novels, since its structure entails a
999-line poem by John Shade and a foreword, commentary with footnotes, and index by Charles Kinbote,
the poet's homosexual neighbor who is really an exile from the distant northern land of Zembla (Russia).
Beyond the obvious parody of pedantic scholarship, the novel explores the interdependencies of
multi-layered worlds, each reflecting and refracting the other: Shade tells his story in verse; Kinbote uses
Shade's poem to reveal his Zemblan past; Gradus, a secret agent intent on killing Kinbote, murders Shade
by mistake; and of course, stalking through the work there is Nabokov, the arch-inventor of them all.
Because the narrative of each layer is invented and sustained by the other, the final effect is a spiral of
artifice.
Ada, Nabokov's most ambitious fiction (although its status among critics remains uncertain), fuses the
novelist's earlier themes and techniques with greater scope and linguistic dexterity. The opening three
chapters present a baroque invocation, a fanfare of language for the core of the novel which chronicles the
incestuous love affair of the precocious hero, Van Veen, and his sister, Ada. Van's obsession with the past
and the novel's eroticism culminate in part in a long lecture on time and space. Here the past becomes an
inseparable link to the present, making a "glittering `now' that is the only reality of Time's texture." Erotic
desire, the art of inventing, and the butterfly's life cycle are metaphors for the constant metamorphosis of
the present, while the future is relegated to an unknowable realm of space. The narrative moves across an
imaginary geography of overlapping Russian, European, and American landscapes, with an equally
overlaid texture of language. All the familiar Nabokovian motifs and devices are heaped against the
aristocratic setting of the "ardors and arbors of Ardis Hall": butterflies and botany, dreams and doubles,
puns, word games, nostalgia, false leads, and eroticism. It is undoubtedly Nabokov's most festive
celebration of language, artifice, and, what should not be overlooked, love.
Transparent Things is a novella bordering on the metaphysical as it deals with the transparency of
objects in the present, and finally of life itself, as death, abetted by chance, brings Hugh Person to a
characteristic Nabokovian ending. Look at the Harlequins! is a first-person memoir of a writer whose life
and works have disguised parallels with Nabokov's own. It is a fiction created out of fiction, a deepening
of the labyrinth of inventing. And while these two works never surpass Ada, they do illustrate what has
been evident in Nabokov from the start, namely, that fiction becomes the only sustained reality beyond
contingent existence--even, no doubt, the sustenance of self.
(Source: Brent MacLaine, "Vladimir Nabokov: Overview," in Reference Guide to American
Literature, 3rd ed., edited by Jim Kamp, St. James Press, 1994.)