The works of Vladimir Nabokov—full of games, puns, parodies, literary allusions, and mad or otherwise untrustworthy narrators—have long been a hunting ground for literary scholars. Robert Roper wants to reclaim them for civilians. The best, he thinks, are products—in whole or part—of Nabokov’s two American decades: the novels Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire, and the memoir Speak, Memory (my favorites, as it happens). Nabokov in America asks, engagingly, how they arose from a love affair with America.
Roper writes well and, mercifully, makes no attempt to mimic Nabokov’s don’t-try-this-at-home prose style. (Symptoms of the mimicry syndrome afflicting many commentators include obsessive alliteration and fondness for the word “palpate.”) He acknowledges debts to “foundational” biographies—Brian Boyd’s of Vladimir and Stacy Schiff’s of his remarkable wife Véra—though he disagrees with some of their judgments; and he has usefully gone back to primary sources, including diaries and scientific papers.
Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 into a wealthy and cultured St. Petersburg family, his father a prominent leader of Russia’s liberal intelligentsia. They escaped the Bolsheviks by fleeing to Berlin—where his father was murdered while shielding a political opponent from an assassination attempt. Living hand-to-mouth, Nabokov became a literary star within the émigré community. He and Véra escaped the Nazis by fleeing first from Berlin to Paris and then, in 1940, at the last possible moment, from France to America—where, never a slacker, he labored prodigiously: teacher, mainly at Wellesley and Cornell; scientist, evolving from talented gentleman
