Vladimir Nabokov and Russian Literary Traditions

It would be hard to find a major Russian writer of the 20th century who was better versed in Russian literature than Vladimir Nabokov. In his Russian writing he responded to his numerous predecessors and contemporaries in many different ways, shaping his own literary pedigree, carefully selecting relatives and guarding against intruders. It is clear that Nabokov’s view of continuity within the context of classical tradition involved disputation, dialog, reinterpretation. 

He believed that a modern Russian writer should incessantly question and test the canon, debunk stale notions, and develop potentialities that have been overlooked or untried. Otherwise the heritage of Russian classical writers gets ossified and they turn into “rag dolls for schoolgirls” like those meaningless toys on which Cincinnatus C. used to work. His strategy of re-examination, reshuffling, appropriation, and rejection was made explicit in The Gift, whose heroine, as he quipped in the English foreword, was not Zina, Fyodor’s lover and muse, but Russian Literature. 

With Nabokov’s switch to English and, correspondingly, to a different literary context, the role of the Russian literary tradition in his writings changed. As he put it in the sly essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” his English books, in contrast to the Russian ones, are devoid of “the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.” 

This means that the umbilical cord through which Nabokov’s Russian oeuvre had been connected to the classical heritage was severed and the tradition itself became an object of contemplation from afar (and often the butt of hollow mockery, like in the first sentence of Ada) rather than a battlefield of constant engagement. Yet even in his English novels that do not have any Russian protagonists and/or story lines (for example, in Lolita and Pale Fire) we can discern an important Russian substratum accessible only to the ideal bilingual reader.