Word: nabokovs
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...there did remain a need for a fuller, totally accurate account of his life. As Nabokov told Field, "The first biography, no matter what comes after, casts a certain shadow on the others." It is characteristic of Nabokov's precision and fastidiousness that he would like to arrange those shadows. Says Field: "He was defending his life. I was defending my task and my independence...
Both parties are well served by Nabokov: His Life in Part. The book is a valuable document that provides the sort of details that would have grounded Speak, Memory. Field delves into Nabokov's genealogy: the evidence is circumstantial, but the possibility of noble Tartar ancestors is strong. In his mother's family tree there are Baltic barons and Teutonic knights. There are added highlights to previous glowing portraits of Nabokov's father V.D. Nabokov, an authority on criminal law and a courageous liberal in Russia's first, shortlived Parliament. He was killed...
Many facts about Nabokov's youth and early manhood are little known be cause of what Field sees as the aristocratic artist's need to be inaccessible to others. If, for example, Nabokov had told us that Leo Tolstoy once patted him on the head, it would sound like name dropping. When Field relates the incident, it not only is delightful in itself but also becomes part of a rich cultural context...
Field carefully turns the native and foreign soils that have nurtured his subject: the Cambridge University days when Nabokov devoted most of his time to sports and writing Russian poetry; the vigor of exile literature in prewar Europe; dispersal of emigre energies and talents after the war began. Nabokov's love affair with America, his teaching experiences at Wellesley and Cornell, and his success with Lolita are covered in more detail than most readers may care to absorb. But Nabokov's friendship and celebrated squabble with Edmund Wilson are sensitively yet amusingly rendered...
Field believes that the young relationship in the early '40s was uneasy because both writers were at awkward stages in their careers. Nabokov's European reputation had yet to transplant itself to America. Wilson the literary journalist was just becoming Wilson the critic and man of letters. Furthermore, says Field, Wilson often chose to play the brooding Russian, while Nabokov played the easygoing American. The following conversation is reported to have taken place in 1942 - Wilson: "Do you believe in God?" Nabokov: "Do you?" Wilson: "What a strange question!" According to Field, the friendship ended in 1954, when...