Maxim D Shrayer on Nabokov

You’ve started with Nabokov’s collected short stories.

This is my favourite collection, and a lot of my own work on Nabokov deals with the stories. About 60 of them were written in Russian, ten in English. They cover four decades of Nabokov’s literary life and are representative of his dynamic as a writer both in Russian and in English, and as both a European and an American émigré. If you want to see his various predilections, the aesthetics and politics of Nabokov’s work, then the stories are a great place to go. Nabokov leaves a mark on the genre – some have argued that they are among the very best Russian, European, American short stories ever written. They are a great example of late, blazing modernism.

After Lolita made Nabokov famous, he oversaw the enterprise of Englishing his Russian works, and the stories are done very well. Back in the 1930s – he was already a famous émigré author but unknown in the English-speaking world – several stories had been translated, by Gleb Struve and others. In the 1940s Nabokov had collaborated with a man by the name of Petr Pertzoff, producing exemplary translations of his finest Russian stories. Subsequently, he worked closely with his son Dmitri Nabokov, who is a dedicated son and a gifted translator. Vladimir Nabokov would say that, unless a translator was working directly from the Russian, they should work from an existing English translation – not necessarily a kosher procedure, strictly speaking, but a valid one in Nabokov’s case. If you were to compare some of the Russian originals with the English versions line by line, they would not be identical. But Nabokov got to have a second go at the stories, in a way, and he made changes. I don’t want to say he improved them, but they tell a more complete story – in English – of his literary career.

Nabokov’s stories go back to Chekhov and Bunin and the great Russian love story, in which desire and memories interact, mostly in unhappy ways for the characters, but happily for the reader. The writing displays the perfect command of the form. In ‘Spring in Fialta’, penned in 1936, an artist realises that the death of his beloved has been a turning point of his own artistic creativity. But the stories, art and artistry notwithstanding, do address politics and ideology, too. It amazes me to this day that some readers think of Nabokov as this ivory tower artist, a vertiginous craftsman above all, without knowing or acknowledging that at key points he was capable of expressing his strong ethical and historical views in no uncertain terms. He might have been the first American writer, for example, to write about the falsification of the Holocaust, in a story published in the New Yorker in June 1945. So there is a lot there in the stories. They are a treasure trove.

Now you’ve chosen Nabokov’s Glory.

I love Glory and am in a minority group among Nabokov fans in that. Andrei Bitov, a prominent Russian author who had first read Nabokov in Soviet samizdat, once declared that you were either a Gift-ist or a Glory-ist. If I had to choose I would say I am a Glory-ist. In some ways, it is the most purely Nabokovian novel.

What is it about?

In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Martin (in Russian, Martyn) Edelweiss, a part-Swiss Russian émigré, finds himself at Cambridge, where Nabokov himself went. Estranged from his surroundings, Martin contemplates crossing the border from Latvia into the Soviet Union where he plans to do something, perhaps political subterfuge. But really it is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character’s disappearance into the realm of pure art. The end is incredibly haunting. Martin’s English friend Darwin (a very suggestive name) brings news of Martin’s disappearance to his mother. There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art. It’s very hard to do this in the practice of fiction – you can’t be too schematic and theoretical, but you can’t underplay the narrative hand, either. Imagine, the years are 1930-32, Nabokov was still a young writer, it was his fourth novel, and in a sense his vision here is so complete. Glory is a Russian novel written in Berlin, originally serialised in an émigré quarterly, and many years later translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov and his father – very well translated, I think.

Now, Pnin.

I deliberately chose Glory over The Gift, but I have to get the American years in. There is Lolita in the back of everybody’s mind, of course, and 95 per cent of the students who take my undergraduate course are doing it because of Lolita. But I’m choosing Pnin instead for two reasons. Firstly, Lolita looms so large that I don’t have to choose it, but, secondly, because Pnin is the immigrant of Nabokov’s American novels. The main character is a Russian professor at an American college, and the novel is to a large extent about Russian culture misunderstood by Westerners. But it is also a truncated love story with a moral dilemma.