Vladimir Nabokov

:This page is about the novelist. For his father, the politician, see Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov.

Work

His first writings were in the Russian language, but he came to his greatest distinction in the English language. For this achievement, he has been compared with Joseph Conrad; yet some view this as a dubious comparison, as Conrad only composed in English, never in his native Polish. (Nabokov himself disdained the comparison for aesthetic reasons, declaring, "I differ from Joseph Conradically.") Nabokov translated many of his own early works into English, sometimes in cooperation with his son Dmitri. His trilingual upbringing (English, Russian and French) had a profound influence on his artistry. He has metaphorically described the transition from one language to another as the slow journey at night from one village to another with only a candle for illumination.

Related Topics:
Russian language - English language - Joseph Conrad - French

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Nabokov is noted for his complex plots, clever word play, and use of alliteration. He gained both fame and notoriety with his novel Lolita (1955), which tells of a grown man's consummated passion for a twelve-year-old girl. This and his other novels, particularly Pale Fire (1962), won him a place among the greatest novelists of the 20th century. Perhaps his defining work, which met with a mixed response, is his longest novel, ' (1969). He devoted more time to the construction of this novel than any of his others. Nabokov's fiction is characterized by its linguistic playfulness. Nabokov's short story "The Vane Sisters" is famous in part for its acrostical final paragraph, in which the first letters of each word spell out a ghostly message from beyond the grave.

Related Topics:
Word play - Alliteration - Lolita - 1955 - Pale Fire - 1962 - Novelists - 20th century - 1969 - The Vane Sisters - Acrostical

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Nabokov's stature as a literary critic is founded largely on his four-volume translation of and commentary on Aleksandr Pushkin's Russian soul epic Eugene Onegin. That commentary ended with an appendix called Notes on Prosody which has developed a reputation of its own. This essay stemmed from his observation that while Pushkin's iambic tetrameters had been a part of Russian literature for a fairly short two centuries, they were clearly understood by the Russian prosodists. On the other hand, he viewed the much older English iambic tetrameters as muddled and poorly documented. In his own words:

Related Topics:
Translation - Aleksandr Pushkin - Eugene Onegin - Iamb - Tetrameter - Russian literature

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:I have been forced to invent a simple little terminology of my own, explain its application to English verse forms, and indulge in certain rather copious details of classification before even tackling the limited object of these notes to my translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, an object that boils down to very little—in comparison to the forced preliminaries—namely, to a few things that the non-Russian student of Russian literature must know in regard to Russian prosody in general and to Eugene Onegin in particular.

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His translation was the focus of a bitter polemic among him and other translation theorists; he had rendered the very precisely metered and rhyming novel in verse as (by his own admission) a stumbling, non-metrical, non-rhymed prose version. He argued that all verse translations of Onegin fatally betrayed the author's use of language; critics replied that failure to make the translation as beautifully styled as the original was a much greater betrayal.

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Nabokov's detractors fault him for being an aesthete and for his overattention to language and detail rather than character development. In his essay "Nabokov, or Nostalgia," Danilo Ki? wrote that Nabokov's is "a magnificent, complex, and sterile art."

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