Word: vadim
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...broad outline, the narrator's life resembles the author's: When the Bolshevist revolution strikes, Vadim Vadimovich N finds it expedient to leave his native Russia; after a few years at Cambridge and a few in Paris as a writer-in-exile, he crosses the ocean to become a writer-in-residence at a prestigious Eastern university. The memoirs at hand dash through some fifty years, four wives, and a series of books (first in Russian and later in English) that correspond, more or less, to Nabokov...
Look at the Harlequins! looks most devotedly at the wives and the books, being at once a catalogue of Vadim's loves and "catalogue raisonne of the roots and origins and amusing birth canals of many images in my Russian and especially English fiction." We don't get a satisfying view, though. Wives and books--all, apparently, harlequins-- remain "outlines directed by reason" (to use the words of a younger Nabokov) seen as though through "the faceted eye of an insect." Vadim's wives are never more than shallow foils for his self-indulgence. One can't help suspecting that...
There are translation jokes: Keats' "A thing of beauty is a joy forever" goes through a Russian sieve and becomes "A pretty bauble always gladdens us." There is a half-hearted sort of dabbling with modernist experimentation: Vadim suspects that he is subject to the whims of a higher authorial power, and is bothered...
Forefeel of Fame. "Apart from incipient lunacy," writes Vadim, "I have been in excellent health throughout adulthood." He can be pleased with a literary career, which brought him in youth the heady "forefeel of fame" and later allowed him to strut as "a fat, famous writer in his powerful forties." Lechery has been a constant, though a Humbert-Lolita relationship with his daughter never flowered to the extent that he, in damp imagining, would have liked. Yet to each of four prospective brides, he has had to admit that he is cracked: "I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning...
...Vadim Vadimych's problem, the reader may feel, is excessively rarefied. He can imagine that he is walking up a village street from his house, for instance, to the post office, but he cannot then imagine himself turning around and facing the same street in the opposite direction. Rather than pivot easily on toe and heel, he must with hideous effort swing his entire dream street, post office, taxis, stray dogs and all, 180° around on the axis of his own mad self. Eventually, obsession invades reality. He walks to the end of a real village street, cannot...