Free Nabokov in America by Robert Roper

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Likeanyone embarking on a book project, I was nervous as I found myself edging into this one. Great authors intimidate even as they attract, and Nabokov is immense: all of Western literature is in play with him, finds a conduit through him. He is the great python of art, having made bulging repasts of Russian literature, French literature, and English literature from Shakespeare forward; throwing in his own twentieth century, from the Silver Age poets of his youth to the postmodernism he largely brought into being, he becomes about the longest literary snake ever. I have enjoyed reading him since I was very young. The pleasure I take has a lot to do with time: not how he handles it as a theme, but how I experience it as I read him. His sentences happen at a pace that makes my brain happy, that intoxicates, and I find that I have “enough time” to read this or that passage without worrying, for once, about how many pages remain until I’ve finished yet another book. For me there is something unique with him, something very like the “enchantment” he often spoke of wanting his readers to feel.
    He has been much studied, by professional scholars and by amateur appreciators. The devotion of these Nabokovians takes the form of conferences, websites, listservs, newsletters, societies organized in his name, numberless articles and books, and so forth. I myself am a Nabokovian—I say it proudly, while fully aware of its taint of fandom. Yet as a Nabokovian I am uncomfortable, mildly, with the tone of adoration. The promiscuous use of the word genius , for example, unsettles me. The great writer is reckoned a genius of the novel, of poetry, of entomology, of the short story; of college teaching to classes of three or four hundred, of the chess problem of the “solus rex” type; of the theater play, of the essay. All right, I will allow that he was a very talented fellow—an extremely talented fellow. *
    Iam put in mind, however, of a concept first explained to me by the historian Judith Walkowitz: the concept of the bar mitzvah boy. The bar mitzvah boy is gifted at everything, he insists that you admire him, and if you don’t believe he’s wonderful and the best there is, you only have to ask his mother. The issue is not whether Nabokov achieved superb things of several kinds, but why, 115 years after his birth, distinguished scholars are still carrying water for him, arguing for his status as a polymathic genius. Why did Nabokov himself maneuver to be recognized as such? You would think that he would have grown up.
    Worship leads to possessiveness, I’ve noticed, and what I most feared as I set out was that a network of scholars, all of whom knew each other well and many of whom knew Nabokov’s work (especially the work in Russian) much, much better than I, would resent my uninvited intrusions. But as it happens, when I did get in touch with this or that Nabokov authority, he or she was unfailingly kind. I realized at some point that I needed to read everything that had been written about him. I sat in a comfortable chair for two years and ingested the biographical and critical literature. Much of it, to my pleasure, was witty, substantial, revelatory. In itself it was enjoyable to read—as literary commentary should be. The best of it took me back to my halcyon college days, when I read well-phrased ruminations by the likes of John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Edmund Wilson—men I imagined as tweedy gents smoking pipes in rooms full of books, a fire in the grate, snow drifting down outside the mullioned window. I had gone to a small college where the philosopher Monroe Beardsley—co-author of the important New Critical pronunciamento “The Intentional Fallacy”—lectured, and though I had never made it into one of Beardsley’s classes, his approach somehow rubbed off on all the young English professors on campus. They taught me to