Free Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd Page A

published not under his regular Russian pseudonym, Vladimir Sirin, but under the pseudonym Vasily Shishkov. Some keen readers of Nabokov think the poetry he writes for John Shade intentionally poor. Other excellent readers of poetry, such as the critic Helen Vendler and the poet R. S. Gwynn, consider his poetry first-rate, hiding depths of concealed design under its glittering surface patterns. A forthcoming publication of Shade’s “Pale Fire” unencumbered by Kinbote (see chapter 24 , “ ‘Pale Fire’: Poem and Pattern”); a pseudo-facsimile edition of the poem, on index cards, as if Shade’s own manuscript; and the translations Dmitri continues to produce, including his excellent version of his father’s longest Russian poem, “A University Poem,” should help in the reappraisal of Nabokov’s lifelong commitment to poetry launched in Paul Morris’s hefty Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice (2010).
    Nabokov translated one of his plays, The Waltz Invention , at a publisher’s invitation in the mid-1960s. Dmitri translated four more for The Man from the USSR and Other Plays . Once Tommy Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy complete their translation of the longest and most colorful of the Russian plays, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn , and it is published with the long and short versions of his Lolita screenplays, readers will have about 800 pages of Nabokov’s dramatic writing to factor into their sense of his work.
    Nabokov also wished to collect his verse translations but, like Véra, did not find the time. Now Verses and Versions , although it omits his translations into Russian and French verse, allows the Anglophone reader to appreciate easily the hundreds of pages of verse he translated from Russian into English outside those already published in separate books, the anonymous medieval Song of Igor’s Campaign (1959) and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1964, revised 1975). The thousand pages of notes to his translation into English of Eugene Onegin have been translated into Russian as the best commentary available in any language.
    Nabokov as a reader of other writers was known in his lifetime from his highly personal and penetrating study Nikolay Gogol . Thanks to the enthusiasm of former students like Alfred Appel Jr., Hannah Green, and the New York journalist Ross Wetzsteon, his lectures were already renowned before the publication of the four volumes in the early 1980s. Those have now become talismans for writers and readers, if not for academic critics. The impression created by the existing volumes of lectures, that Nabokov focused only on the peak of his homeland’s output, will be corrected in the new volumes of Russian literature. His Eugene Onegin displays his scholarly precision but little of the warm personal passion for Pushkin visible in his Russian fiction, especially The Gift . This warmth saturates the new lectures, where his interest in Pushkin as writer and man and icon of artistic freedom radiates from page after page. Nabokov’s own artistic credo, often tantalizingly oblique in his fiction, poetry, and drama, here receives its most direct expression in his comments on other writers. With the forthcoming lectures, we will have three volumes of Nabokov’s translations of Russian verse, the two volumes of Eugene Onegin annotations, and soon two or three volumes of his Cornell lectures on Russian literature: seven or eight volumes from the man who forms a natural bridge between Russian and English literature.
    Another aspect of Nabokov’s extraordinary output was his passion for butterflies and his work as a professional lepidopterist. Field was so little interested in this side of his subject that he imagined Nabokov climbing trees to catch butterflies. My biography established the seriousness of Nabokov’s science. About the time it appeared, lepidopterists working in South America were discovering new species of Blues, Nabokov’s specialty, in the Andes. They also discovered that Nabokov,