Talk delivered at the Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg, 1 June 2000

I can▓t tell you what a thrill it is for me to be in this man▓s house. I don▓t think there▓s a writer whose work I love and admire more. I have read Lolita four times, and Ada three, and I couldn▓t you tell how many times I▓ve turned, in wonder and delight, to Pale Fire. There was a period last year when I was reading the passage that describes Ada▓s system of Bridges and Towers at least once a week. Sometimes, if I▓m feeling slack or lazy, I▓ll get down his biography and look at some picture of him. Young and sporting or old and fat he has an unmistakable air of integrity and haughtiness. I feel challenged and even mocked by his expression. He looks as if he has formed a rather low opinion of me. I get back to work.

I might as well just come all the way out and confess that there were many times in the course of the writing of my latest novel--always at some crucial point--when I felt, as the dial-a-psychics say, that he was with me. This last book took me more than four years to write and along the way there were rough spots. It is a roomy book, and every so often I got lost in it. At other times I found myself caught up in great gusts of writing, sprinting through fifty pages in five or six days. In the middle drafts, there was the crisis week when you realize that what needs to be re-conceived, re-invented is not the damn book but you. And sometimes you just do not feel at all up to the task. Often, when I was in one of these periods of stress and ferment, I would go for a walk. Sometimes it was in the countryside; at other times I would just walk around my neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I live. I would cli! mb up out of the Cave of Wonders I spent four years spelunking, pale and squinting, and get out in the breeze and the sunshine. And I would always see a butterfly. A lone flapping straggler sometimes; or sometimes the woods or the long grass would be filled with them. (I just want to say here that I know nothing at all about butterflies, or chess, for that matter). There were butterflies in New Hampshire, and the next year in Old Chatham, New York. One summer the yard of our house was throbbing with little white ones. Doubtless, in each case, it was the time of year and the fact that my most intense periods of work on the book tended to occur when I retreated to the country or a week or two. But each time I derived as great comfort from the sudden dizzy trajectory of a little scrap of orange and brown across my path as a believer would from a heavenly sign.

Such idolatry may sound a little extreme, but I doubt very seriously that I am the only American writer who feels this way about Vladimir Nabokov. In fact I think there may be many of us. Since I am the only one here this evening, I will presume to speak for the group.

What we love about him, first and foremost, is his English. It▓s a conundrum that for me approaches the absurd opacity of a Zen koan to try to imagine how English written by a Russian sounds to Russians reading in English, but to our ears, Nabokov▓s English combines aching lyricism with dispassionate precision in a way that seems to render every human emotion in all its intensity but never with an ounce of shmaltz or soggy language. He has an amazing feeling for the syntactic tensility of an English sentence, the way an ironic aside or parenthesis can be tucked into a fold with devastating effect or a metaphor can be worked until it is as thin as gold leaf. He sings, he gloats, he sorrows and mourns, he hurls tridents and thunderbolts, and somehow his sentences remain calm at all times, measured, composed. Sometimes we have dreams in which we are writing, and writing brilliantly. The idea we express has never before been put quite so well as we are putting it. We▓r! e astonished by our own talent and style. Some part of us knows all along that we▓re just dreaming, and is thinking rather confusedly I can▓t wait to wake up and show everybody this incredible, marvelous book that I▓m writing! When we wake up, we grab a pen and a pad and scramble to jot down the sentences we can still remember, which even now like words drawn in the sand with a sharp stick are filling with seawater and melting away. Probably this has happened to you. Everything that only moments before struck us as unspeakably profound turns out to be a bunch of non sequiturs and nonsense. The iridescent silk of our dream book has turned to pocket fuzz. A page of Nabokov at his best√and he was so often at his best!√is almost as wonderful as those perfect books we read in our dreams.

With the books from his first life, the books written in Russian, it▓s harder to tell. You must remember that all the early Nabokov we read was translated under the very narrow scrutiny of Vladimir Nabokov himself. So what you have is Americans reading a book that was written in Russian by a speaker of English and then translated into English by a speaker of Russian. Sometimes the language has a muffled quality. It feels like Nabokov in gloves. But I love The Gift. Dar, is the title in Russian. I think it sounds far more fatal and serious, in Russian. Dar. It sounds like something that is not bestowed on one so much as imposed by an irresistible giver. I don▓t think I have ever delighted more in a passage of fiction than in the section of that lovely, sad, charming novel√I think it▓s his most romantic book√detailing the explorer father▓s Central Asian wanderings, and his mysterious disappearance. His evocation of a time and part of the world of! which he had no direct experience is a prodigious feat of imagination. In my new book a character passes away the Second World War at a lonely Naval station in the wastes of Antarctica. I was pretty proud of that section of the book until I read in The Gift about the travels of Konstantin Kirilovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev. I had envisioned the featureless white prairie and the overheated subterranean huts, redolent of sled dog and seal grease, in which my character languished, but somehow Nabokov had managed to transport himself back to the steppe of 1890s. It makes one wish that Nabokov had tried his hand at a full-length work of historical fiction√unless perhaps Ada qualifies as historical fiction.

But I am getting away from my subject, which was the things about Nabokov that make us love him. His English was the first. The second is the bittersweetness, born of memory and regret, that is such a dominant flavor in his work. Our literature has always been an exile▓s literature, locked in a struggle between ambiguous yearning for the mother country and the mother tongue on the one hand and on the other a firm resolve to make good on its own here. The taunting memory of a lost, original paradise is inherent in our writing from Hawthorne to DeLillo. Nabokov may in this respect be the most American of writers, and to those of us who grew up in an era when nostalgia was mined, refined and added like fluoride to the national water supply, taught that we were living at the end of time, in a debased America that had once linked mighty oceans and defeated Hitler, to those of us exiled from our own history there is intense appeal in Nabokov▓s deep, unassuageable homesickness. ! And yet, as I said, Nabokov is never maudlin. He never gets drunk before us and sings weepy songs in his native tongue while dressed in the typical costume of his homeland. He returns to the theme of exile again and again, but for the most part he treats it with an astringent irony, mocking the very feelings that break the exile▓s heart. Pale Fire is the masterpiece of his comedies of exile.

His treatment of nostalgia leads me to the third thing that we love about Nabokov: his treatment, in general, of human emotions. Some people, I know, find Nabokov cool, even cold; aloof, Olympian, inhuman. Some people, picturing him with his killing jar and mounting pin, even call him a cruel writer. He is none of these; his characters are often cruel, and so are their fates, but in this regard I don▓t think anyone could really argue that Nabokov▓s version of the world and its denizens is unrealistic or simply a reflection of him. He often traffics in the less popular emotions: humiliation, chagrin, remorse, discomfiture. I think of Gogol and Chekhov and wonder if Russian writers have greater insight into the pain of human social interaction. I don▓t see how anyone could read Nabokov▓s tender portrayal of the Chernyshevskys, that sad old couple in Dar who are haunted by the specter of their murdered son, and accuse him of cruelty. Or the tale of poor, superfluous L! ucette, in Ada, or of Pale Fire▓s Sybil Shade. And Pnin. All of the humor in that funny, touching book ultimately derives from the depth and restraint of Nabokov▓s tenderness.

It is this quality of emotional reserve that makes Nabokov so affecting if occasionally, as in Speak, Memory, frustrating. It▓s the gentlemanly reticence, with a Victorian tinge, of the Cambridge-educated amateur scientist. Sometimes Nabokov reminds us of a hero in John Buchan or H. Rider Haggard: handsome, taciturn and modest, well but carelessly dressed, endlessly competent, capable of enduring hardship and deprivation without a murmur, ready for anything, and proudly retaining some impenetrable core of self that renders his truest, innermost thoughts and motives not only inaccessible but, frankly, old man, none of our damn business. In his autobiographical utterances, in interviews and memoirs he will admit to nothing; he never complains or confesses to doubt. But in his fiction, behind the masks of his generally wayward and tormented characters, his understanding of human pain is allowed to emerge, in a controlled but steady stream that burns very clear. Except! , of course, when it comes to the emotion of love. Only here√and when he has brought in Stalin or Freud for their one of their regular thrashings√does Nabokov consent to abandon a little bit of his composure. In love and hate, the gentleman scientist is quick to express himself.

I think we forget, when we have not read him for a while, just how lyrical Nabokov can be when describing an object of desire. He is a gastronome of women, intimately familiar with their ingredients, flavor and shape, and never so happy as when sitting down to feast. Ultimately, that happiness is the eternal part of his work. Through all of his work no matter how bleak or tortured, no matter how playful or grand, there runs a current of pure sensuous pleasure, of delight taken in effects of light and shadow and of the human face and body. He is marvelous at cataloging and describing the sounds of water in motion, at furnishing a room with the odor of its dusty cushions and the murky green light from its neighboring garden, at noticing the shifting coloration in a woman▓s skin, the surprising behavior of her hair, after a bath, a swim, or an hour of making love. The pleasure to be derived in a momentary sensation is so intense, in Nabokov, that it can arrest the flow of ti! me, and remain fixed in the memory for years and even decades afterward. Here the personal and the impersonal merge, and Nabokov reveals to us his essential romanticism. Behind, beyond, above or around this our life, with its indignities and misery and shame, there is an eternal, timeless something, an intelligence or pattern that can sometimes be inferred from the deceptive markings of a butterfly, the bees and cowbells of an afternoon, or the tracery of veins on a young girl▓s eyelid.

Or, for those of us so fortunate as to read him and love him, from the works of Vladimir Nabokov.