Free Nabokov in America by Robert Roper Page B

guided my reading of Nabokov’s Russian-language correspondence. Simon Belokowsky ably translated all documents from Russian, although the final wording in English is my responsibility. Olga Andreyev Carlisle, memoirist and clear-eyed participant in some of the monumental politico-literary dramas of the twentieth century, entertained and enlightened me during a discussion of Nabokov’s grudges against the Soviets and against history itself. Sarah Funke Butler, of Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller, in New York, helped me track down N.’s personal copy of Edmund Wilson’s A Window on Russia , with N.’s bemused marginal notations on Wilson’s comments on N.’s career. Avery Rome, one of the sharpest editors I’ve ever encountered, heard me out and offered typically thoughtful advice at numerous points in my writing and research. Michael Doise, literary investigator in Rouen, France, discovered the cost of steamship tickets for the Nabokovs in 1940 on the French Line vessel Champlain . For my portrait of Dmitri Nabokov, I was fortunate to be able to interview the closest American friends of his young adulthood: Barbara Victor, Sandy Levine, and Brett Schlesinger, all of New York. Ivan and Peter Nabokov, Dmitri’s cousins and the older two sons of Nicolas Nabokov, helped me understand some themes of the family’s protean encounter with America. Their accounts of their lives and careers were extraordinary “speakings of memory.”
    At the Houghton Library, Harvard, the Beinecke Library, Yale, and the Library of Congress, I was benignly left alone by considerate and efficient staff who made me feel, as I always feel when I visit institutions like these, that I am deeply fortunate to be a citizen of anopen society, one that has provided, so far, adequate resources for the preservation of the written past.
    My astute wife, the historian Mary Ryan, held my hand, listened to me complain, argued with me, and seemed oddly confident that I would eventually find a way to write about Nabokov in America. I thank her and embrace her. Michael Carlisle, my redoubtable, ever-cheering agent, was a brick and a joy to have on my side, and Anton Mueller, my editor at Bloomsbury, and his colleague Rachel Mannheimer added insight and calming good counsel at various points. I wish also to thank personal friends who engaged with me in the sort of discussions that make projects like this one, with so many aspects and complications, feel doable. Robert Spertus and Paul Gruber, deep readers and men of learning who wear it lightly, were especially helpful, as was Peter Jelavich, the great scholar of modern Germany. For this writer, the most treasured friends are those before whom one finds oneself unable not to speak freely.

    * There is also the school of testy carping, of taking on the great man and knocking him down a peg or two. This is probably best exemplified by the writer Andrew Field, whose studies of Nabokov in the seventies and eighties seemed to want to prove that the critic was just as smart as his subject. The current author hopes not to be Fieldian. He also hopes that his study will not be seen as a vulgar nationalist assault on the assertively multi-nationalist VN, claiming him for xenophobic America, tucking him deep into the American Lit folder and saying that that’s the last word to be said about him. There are no last words.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
    Abrams,M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature , vol. 2, 4th ed. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1979.
    Adkins, Lynn. “Jesse L. Nusbaum and the Painted Desert in San Diego.” Journal of San Diego History 29, no. 2 (Spring 1983).
    Agee, James. “The Great American Roadside.” Fortune 10 (September 1934): 53–63, 172, 174, 177.
    Ahuja, Nitin. “Nabokov’s Case Against Natural Selection.” Tract , 2012. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/tract/nabokov.html .
    Alden, Peter D. “H.M.C. Climbing Camp, 1953.” Harvard Mountaineering , no. 12 (May 1955).
    Alexander, Victoria N. “Nabokov,