NP: Nabokov as Author (from Vera)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Stacy Schiff, Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).  Modern Library: New York, 1999.

regarding N as author:

"Nabokov was so huge and protean a presence on the page that he left little room for those who might attach themselves to the literature.  He never tired of telling his reader how he was to be read; the man who believed in the supremacy of the individual was a benevolent (sometimes not so benevolent) dictator in his prefaces.  He insinuated himself everywhere.  He could occupy the footnotes (Pale Fire); supply his own review (the long-unpublished last chapter of Speak, Memory); parody his flap copy (Ada); affix a fictional foreward (Lolita); respond to his editor's qualms in an afterward (Nikolai Gogol); offer up a misleading geneological tree (Ada again); displace even the well-meaning editor who might affix a list of his previous titles to the front matter of a novel (Look at the Harlequins!).  There was no textual apparatus from which he failed merrily to swing.  By definition, only an intrepid reader was going to be able to meet him on his own ground" (54-5).



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