Free Nabokov in America by Robert Roper Page A

avoid a biographical approach, taught me to look for “structure” and “patterns of imagery” in texts whose purpose I was not to worry about, and the books of criticism they assigned us to read were, as I said, engaging in their own right.
    The scholars who answered my occasional queries include Professor Brian Boyd, of the University of Auckland; Professor Eric Naiman, ofthe University of California, Berkeley; and Professor Emeritus Stephen J. Parker, of the University of Kansas. For an enjoyable lunch and discussion of some matters that had long puzzled me, though for him they were old hat, I wish to thank Professor John Burt Foster Jr., of George Mason University, whose Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism is the single most suggestive work on Nabokov’s cultural inheritance that I found. Professor Foster read the present book in manuscript and pointed out a number of embarrassing mistakes. The manuscript also benefited from—and the author took encouragement from—a close reading by Professor Galya Diment, of the University of Washington, whose own writing about Nabokov is full of quiet humor and strong feeling. Other readings came courtesy of the writer/ epidemiologist Andrew Moss, of San Francisco, and the novelist/memoirist Rob Couteau, of New Paltz, New York.
    Herb Gold, who knew Dmitri Nabokov as a tennis partner and who took over Vladimir’s classes at Cornell, entertained me with stories of both men—very funny stories. Richard Buxbaum, hired to help with the drive to Utah one summer, gave me a feeling for what it had been like to be cooped up with the family in a moving vehicle for a few weeks: in a word, fascinating.
    At the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the richest archive of Nabokov materials in the world, the staff were always welcoming, their ethos of tolerant professionalism making the Berg a joy to visit, even if the main reading room is sometimes a degree too cold. My uncertain questings found focus through the assistance of curator Isaac Gewirtz and librarians Becky Finer, Anne Garner, and Lyndsi Barnes. At the American Museum of Natural History, David Grimaldi, curator of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, helped me understand the kind of lepidopterological literature Nabokov was likely to have read in the 1940s. (Taxonomic rather than theoretical: Nabokov was uninterested in, or at any rate uninformed about, breakthrough concepts in population genetics developed in the twenties that would come to undergird modern evolutionary thinking.) Suzanne Rab Green, also of the AMNH, gave me a colorful account of her discovery, with Dr. Grimaldi, of insect specimens Nabokov had collected in ’41 and given to the museum, which had then languished in a closet for seventy years. Andrew Johnston, scientific assistant for lepidoptera, helped me search out other Nabokov gifts to the museum.
    At the Museum of Comparative Zoology, at Harvard, Rod Eastwood was generous with his time, despite my being only the latest in a longline of fans curious to see where Nabokov had worked, what his bugs had looked like, which window his workbench sat under, etc. Also at Harvard, Peter McCarthy, the undergraduate president of the Harvard Mountaineering Club, answered questions about club tradition and led me down to the meeting room in Claverly Hall, with its old climbing gear lying about, its tattered climbing books, and its general air of a fraternity basement.
    As I put together the story of the Nabokovs’ flight from France in May 1940, I spent some days at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, in New York, where I was guided by Fruma Mohrer, chief archivist, and by archivists Gunnar Berg, Leo Greenbaum, and Roberta Elliott. Valery Bazarov, HIAS director of Family History and Location Services, gave me an understanding of that organization’s actions early in World War II and of its role in getting the Nabokovs out. Tanya Chebotarev, of the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia University,