Free Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd

in publishing, translating, or adapting Nabokov works, and translate the primary literary texts—there still remain other poems and Nabokov’s longest and most exuberant play, Tragediya Gospodina Morna ( The Tragedy of Mister Morn , not published even in Russian until 1997)— and edit the remaining texts, the uncollected prose and interviews, the remaining lectures, and the remaining letters. I did not initiate Nabokov’s Butterflies , or Verses and Versions , but I have been interested for many years in editing Nabokov’s uncollected prose and am happy also to edit his remaining Russian lectures and his Russian letters, and eventually the still-unpublished English letters.
    What difference can Nabokov’s posthumous literary legacy make? What has changed in our understanding of Nabokov since his death, and what chances for further change do we have?
    Perhaps the first was our growth in knowledge of Nabokov the man. Field’s Nabokov: His Life in Part was published in 1977, in the month Nabokov died, but what one reviewer called its “incompetence and malice” meant that despite Nabokov’s hundreds of pages of corrections to Field’s typescripts, it still offered very little knowledge of or insight into the man. 4 The editing of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979) had begun while Nabokov was still alive. This rich correspondence showed the back story to the fierce public rift in the mid-1960s between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, the leading American critic from the 1930s to the 1960s, and Nabokov’s close involvement in American literary life from 1940, despite to many seeming to arrive like a bolt from the blue in the late 1950s. Selected Letters, 1940–1977 offered more glimpses of Nabokov while leaving many gaps, but as John Updike wrote in response: “What a writer! And, really, what a basically reasonable and decent man.” My Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) benefitted from years in Nabokov’s and other archives from Moscow to Stanford and from interview leads the archives suggested. The two volumes allowed a full treatment of Nabokov’s Russian context; his Russian writing; his other American careers as a lepidopterist and a teacher, translator, and scholar; and the protective withdrawal of his final European years from 1959 to 1977. Stacey Schiff’s Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) offered another perspective. When Letters to Véra appears in 2011 it will finally correct the image some still have, despite all the evidence in his literary work and outside, of Nabokov as somehow cold and aloof. When his letters to his family—to his parents, sister, and brother—appear a little later, they will show a loving and playful son, a supportive and sometimes critically corrective brother. When his letters to his other Russian friends, especially other writers, artists, and musicians, appear—usually much more intense and intimate than the equivalent letters in English—they will illuminate his intense engagement in, as well as his self-protective creative detachment from, Russian émigré cultural life.
    Many have read Lolita but little else of Nabokov. Even many much better acquainted with his work knew little, for a long time, beyond his prose fiction and his memoirs. In his own late years Nabokov wanted to make less-prominent sides of his achievement visible when he translated his Russian poems, collected his English poems, republished his chess problems in Poems and Problems , and, with Dmitri’s help, translated three volumes of Russian stories in the 1970s. When he was too unwell to write more, in his last years, he selected his Russian poems, published as Stikhi two years after his death. Nabokov’s poetry has always divided readers. Some see it as light, brittle, old-fashioned. Georgiy Adamovich, the most influential émigré critic, regularly dismissed it, only to fall into Nabokov’s trap and hail as works of a new genius two poems Nabokov